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ftr^il — 

Chap.!:_____ Copyright No.._ 

SheIf.. J .W^-S 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 


^ ° F C OJY Q * 
RECE'VED ^ * 



JUN 11 1898 
















THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 






THE HOPE 


OF IMMORTALITY 


REV. J. E. C. WELLDON 

Head Master of Harrow School 


i gorft 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 

1898 


All rights reserved 




S808 


Copyright, 1898, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



TWO COPIED RECEIVED* 


2 nr' 


1898 . 


Nortooiti tresis 

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 


/ 


o 

<N 





V 


PREFACE 


The circumstances in which this Essay has been 
written will account more or less for its character. 

Some time ago the publishers invited me to write 
a book upon the subject of Immortality. They 
thought that such a book, if addressed to the intelli¬ 
gence and information not of theological experts 
especially, but of educated men and women in 
general, would not be without a certain value, as 
showing how much of all that renders human life 
sublime and sacred is involved in the belief that 
Man is an immortal being. The consciousness that 
I did not possess, and amidst my duties could 
scarcely hope to acquire, the knowledge necessary 
for the task so kindly laid upon me, made me hesi¬ 
tate to undertake it; but it coincided with my own 
interests and studies, and with the reflexions that 
had long been present to my mind, and I could not 


PREFACE 


yi 

resist the hope that, if I succeeded in executing it, 
it might do some good. 

The book was considerably advanced, when I was 
appointed to the Hulsean Lectureship in the Univer¬ 
sity of Cambridge; and it was permitted me to utilise 
for my Lectures some of the materials already col¬ 
lected for my book. In fact, the first and the three 
last chapters of the book contain the substance of 
the argument put forward in the Lectures, although 
a good deal that is explanatory or illustrative has 
been added to them; the remaining two chapters 
are new. 

Thus the Essay is in part scholarly and in part 
popular; it is not altogether such as it would have 
been if it were designed for one class of readers 
only; but I trust that, with all its faults, it may be 
regarded as a serious contribution to theological 
thought upon one of the greatest of subjects. 

J. E. C. WELLDON. 


Harrow School, March, 1898. 


CONTENTS 


CHAP 

INTRODUCTION . 

• 

• • • 

PAGE 

I 

I. 

NATURE OF THE BELIEF 

• 

• • • 

I I 

II. 

HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 

• 

\ 

• • • 

64 

III. 

VALUE OF THE BELIEF 

• 

• • • 

120 

IV. 

EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF. 

dences 

A. 

• 

External Evi- 

• • • 

162 

V. 

EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF. 

dences 

B. 

• 

Internal Evi- 

• • • 

2 35 


VI. THE CHRISTIAN AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF . 269 

vii 


u Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? ” 

— Job xiv. io. 

“rls oldev €( t 6 £rjv /i£p io rrt KarOaveiv 
rb KarOavetp St tfjp.” 

— Euripides. 

“ II importe a toute la vie de savoir si l’ame est mortelle 
immortelle.” — Pascal. 


THE 


HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

INTRODUCTION 

The object of this Essay may be easily stated. 
Controversy rages, and perhaps will always rage, 
around the evidences and probabilities of the 
Christian Faith. Such controversy has its own 
necessity, its own value, and its own end. 

But behind all such controversy lie those great 
questions without which the Christian Faith itself 
can hardly become a subject of discussion. The 
existence of God, and as its corollary the immortality 
of the soul, are the postulates of all Revelation. If 
they are not true, neither Christianity nor any other 
spiritual religion can be true. 

In trying to recommend the belief in Immortality 
by such considerations as are independent of Chris¬ 
tianity, I hope it may be said that I am in a sense 
preparing the way for Christian belief. 


B 


i 


2 


INTRODUCTION 


There are many persons who are not theologians 
and yet have deep thoughts and feelings about 
religion ; they may be more or less instructed, more 
or less convinced ; they may wish or they may not 
wish to believe; but they are ready to face the facts 
of human nature and life, although they set little 
store by authority; and an argument conscien¬ 
tiously addressed to them is sure of a conscientious 
criticism at their hands. It is to them that I would 
respectfully offer this little book. I do not ask 
them, and indeed it would be idle to ask them, to 
accept what is said, because this or that thinker has 
said it; but I ask them to ponder it and then to 
accept or reject it as they may think well. At least 
they will recognise in simple honesty the vast and 
vital importance of the doctrine for which I 
plead. 

I plead for a belief in the soul’s Immortality; I 
seek no more than that. The revelations pro¬ 
pounded to mankind have filled up (so to say) the 
area of the Immortal Life more or less positively, 
more or less piously. I do not in this essay aspire 
to fill it up. It is enough for my purpose if there 
be an Immortality within which the Providence of 
the Almighty may work out its inscrutable designs. 


INTRODUCTION 


3 


It has seemed to me as a Christian that I ought 
to say something as to the special light which 
Christianity sheds upon the truth and nature of 
the Immortal Life, and I have tried to say it in the 
last chapter. But the readers whom I have had in 
view are not so much Christians as those who stand, 
as it were, on the borderland of Christianity, and 
would gladly be Christians if they could. The 
mystery of Immortality remains and must remain. 
Every mystery is a great possibility. Life is 
tolerable if it closes in darkness, but not if it is 
known to close in nothingness. To do away the 
hope of another life is, as Goethe said, to do away 
all or nearly all that makes this life worth living. 
But every spiritual conception of life, however 
inadequate, is a witness to the soul’s immortal 
being. The one enemy of religion is material¬ 
ism. 

I do not imagine that it is possible to prove 
Immortality. Divine truths may be believed, 
though they cannot be proved. Faith is the 
complement of reason, not its contradiction. 
Where facts and arguments are nearly balanced, 
it is Faith which turns the scale. I do not aspire 
to prove Immortality but to make it probable. In 


4 


INTRODUCTION 


Theology every belief is subject to difficulty; but it 
is often necessary to ask not only whether a belief 
is difficult but whether other beliefs or denials are 
not more difficult. For Man, as a reasonable being, 
placed in a world where the phenomena invite and 
indeed demand speculation, cannot blow hot and 
cold upon all opinions, cannot face both ways 
perpetually, cannot live out his life in a state of 
suspense or neutrality. He must incline to one 
side of things or to the other; he must hold one 
view to be more probable than another. If the 
soul is not immortal, then it perishes. But the 
belief that the soul perishes or that it may perish 
is in effect (as will presently be argued) the denial 
of God. For to deny or doubt a fact is not seldom 
to assert its opposite. Thus Agnosticism is not 
Atheism; but as, like Atheism, it takes no account 
of God in providing the motives and sanctions of 
morality, its practical consequence is atheistical. 

The evidences of Immortality which are here 
offered are, I hope, such as the subject rightly 
allows. Two great principles — the principle of 
Aristotle, that every subject has its own laws and 
canons of evidence, and the principle of Bishop 
Butler, that probability is the guide of life — are 


INTRODUCTION 


5 


the mainstays of religious thought and action. No 
mathematical fact is doubtful. No historical fact 
is certain. Yet conclusions are necessary as much 
in History as in Mathematics. And action follows 
upon probability as well as upon proof. 

It must be remembered too that evidences, which 
may in themselves be inconclusive, gain weight by 
accumulation. Where a number of considerations 
tend towards a certain belief, the belief possesses a 
stronger assurance than any one or two or three of 
these considerations could impart to it. It is so 
especially in religion; for religion, as expressing the 
relation of the Infinite to finite beings, transcends 
the limits of human reason, it does not admit of 
demonstrative conclusions, it must be to some ex¬ 
tent vague, trustful, hypothetical. In religion he 
is wise who makes the most of such evidence as is 
possible and attainable. So Socrates in the Phcedo 
says pathetically : “ A man should persevere until he 
has achieved one of two things; either he should 
discover or be taught the truth about these ques¬ 
tions ; or if this be impossible, I would have him take 
the best and most irrefragable of human theories, 
and let this be the raft upon which he sails through 
life — not without risk, as I admit, if he cannot find 


6 


INTRODUCTION 


some word of God which will more surely and safely 
carry him.” 1 

It is difficult to be familiar with the history of 
human thought upon the primary fundamental truths 
of religion, and not to feel how little progress 
Humanity has made in all the centuries. The 
spiritual experiences of mankind are in the Vedas. 
The questionings and agonies of soul are in the 
book of Job. The difficulties inherent in Im¬ 
mortality were present to the minds of Pythagoras, 
Plato, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius. The arguments 
for and against the Being of God Himself — the very 
arguments which are advanced and contested to¬ 
day— were the commonplaces of the Stoic, Epicurean, 
and Sceptical Schools. Everywhere old ideas recur; 
old theories reappear. Human thought seems to 
move in a cycle. There is nothing new under the 
sun. 

Yet who is there that may set a bound to the 
powers of the human intellect or the human spirit? 
What man knows not yet, and what it seems that he 
can never know, he may know some day. The 
splendid science of Astronomy stands as a warning 

1 Plato, Phcedo , p. 85. The Translation is, here as elsewhere when 
Plato is quoted, the late Master of Balliol’s. It would be dangerous, if 
not presumptuous, to translate after the Master. 


INTRODUCTION 


7 


against, the prejudice that would set up, as it were, 
intellectual “pillars of Hercules” beyond which the 
inventiveness of man may not proceed. For both 
Socrates in ancient times and Comte in modern have 
disbelieved in astronomical discovery. Xenophon 
in the Memorabilia says of Socrates that he “did 
his utmost to discourage his pupils from studying 
astronomy to such an extent as to understand the 
heavenly bodies which did not move in the same 
orbit as the earth, and the planets and the stars 
which are not fixed stars, and from wasting their 
lives over questions about their distances from the 
earth and their orbits and the causes of them. For 
he saw no good (he said) in these speculations; not 
that he was ignorant of them, but they were calcu¬ 
lated in his opinion to waste a man’s life and to 
prevent his pursuing many useful studies. In fact, 
he was generally opposed to the investigation of the 
Divine method of ordering the movements of the 
heavenly bodies, on the ground that it was beyond 
the scope of human discovery, and that he did not 
think the gods would be pleased with a man for 
trying to find out what it was not their will to make 
plain to human intelligence.” 1 

1 Memorabilia, iv. 7, 5. 


8 


INTRODUCTION 


Still more remarkable is Comte’s scepticism, as 
being subsequent to those astronomical calculations 
and conclusions which are probably the greatest 
triumphs of the human intellect. Yet these are his 
words : “ Scientifically considered Astronomy can be 
little else than the application of mathematical truth 
to the phenomena of the heavenly bodies. ... It is 
true that we are limited to the consideration of geo¬ 
metric or mechanical phenomena which have already 
been reduced to general and abstract theories by the 
preceding science. All attempts to outstep this field 
are necessarily as vain as they are idle, even in a 
problem so simple as that of temperature. Distant 
bodies accessible to no sense but that of vision will 
never admit of researches deserving to be called 
Positive in any other of their phenomena than 
Extension and Motion. So far as we are concerned, 
it is in these that their existence consists.” 1 And 
these words were used within a few years of the 
revelations since made in Astronomy by the spectro¬ 
scope. 

It is evident that no position in science can be so 
unscientific as that of limiting the possibilities of 

1 System of Positive Polity , vol. i., Introductory Principles, chap, ii., 
p. 404, Bridges’ Translation. 


INTRODUCTION 


9 


human knowledge. An inquiry into the evidences of 
Immortality, if it had never yet produced any result, 
would still be always right and always reasonable. 

This essay, indeed, is not intended to be an 
exhaustive treatise. It is sometimes assumed that 
whoever deals with an important subject ought to 
say all that can be said about it. The result is apt 
to be that books are complete, but they are un¬ 
readable, and the teaching which they might give is 
borne down by their excessive weight of learning. 
I have deliberately left a good many things unsaid. 
After all, the object of writing is to please some one 
or to help some one. 

Protestantism is the democracy of religion. It 
appeals to the people not because they are always 
wise or competent judges of religious any more than 
of political questions, but because conscience is sacred 
and supreme, and, where many minds are brought to 
bear upon a subject, the prejudices and peculiarities 
of individuals are corrected, and because candour is 
a part of religion and truth in itself is great and 
it prevails. 

This essay is popular rather than scientific. It is 
intended for readers who are not specially scholars. 
It is for this reason that I have translated most 


IO 


INTRODUCTION 


quotations from classical or foreign authors which 
occur in it, and have generally, though not always, 
cited passages of the Bible in the Authorised Version. 

I have tried to write it in a simple straightforward 
style. So far as was possible, I have avoided using 
technical terms. I have given at the foot of the 
pages the principal references for such quotations or 
allusions as are made in the text. But, upon the 
whole, I have avoided footnotes, as being needless 
and annoying disturbances of a reader’s attention. 
No ancient classical writer used them or seemed to 
need them. 

If at the end of this essay as at the beginning the 
doctrine of Immortality is felt to be involved in 
some uncertainty, may I say that I do not regret it ? 
Uncertainty is the test of moral character. We are 
tested and approved by our attitude of belief and 
conduct in the presence of life’s uncertainties. 
There is no such testing power in mathematical or 
scientific truth. It is moral and spiritual truth 
which tests a man and a nation of men. That is 
the reason why right belief as well as right action 
is presented as human duty in the Bible. And yet 
it is my humble prayer that the great doctrine of 
Immortality may through this essay be made a little 
clearer and dearer to some human soul. 


CHAPTER I 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 

In the experience of every man there is no such 
moment as when he looks for the first time on the 
face of death. He can never forget that moment 
nor ever live as though it had not been. He may 
have spent many years in the world, and the years 
may have been rich in interest and happiness, but 
at last he stands face to face with the reality which 
solemnises and sanctifies all things. From that 
time, even if he be frivolous and careless, he never 
wholly loses the sense of the awful vision. He 
knows that for him — for all his hopes, desires, 
ambitions, enterprises, victories — there is but one 
end. He is another man. 

But as he looks upon the dead, when the first 
strong agony of bereavement begins to spend itself, 
the thoughts which are apt to arise in his mind will 
be such as these: 

The thought of peacefulness. 


ii 


12 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


The life that is over now was embittered perhaps 
by circumstances; it may have been harassed with 
care or stained with sin or tortured with pain it 
may have been distressed, misunderstood, scorned, 
reprobated, condemned ; but its end is peace. The 
beating heart is still. The lips are hushed. The 
eyes are closed as if in sleep. The last farewell has 
been spoken—or it will never be spoken. In spite 
of the keen inevitable regrets, when it is too late 
to speak the word which seems so necessary, so 
natural, comes the feeling that “ the wicked ” in 
death do “ cease from troubling,” and “ the weary 
are at rest.” 

The thought of beauty too. 

The beauty of death is as exquisite as it is 
transient. It has been portrayed in impressive 
language by a great poet whose thoughts were wont 
to play about the subject of Immortality. 

He who hath bent him o’er the dead 
Ere the first day of death is fled. 

(Before decay’s effacing fingers 

Have swept the lines where beauty lingers) 

And mark’d the mild angelic air, 

The rapture of repose that’s there, 

The fix’d yet tender traits that streak 
The languor of the placid cheek, 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


*3 


Some moments, ay, one treacherous hour, 

He still might doubt the tyrant’s power; 

So fair, so calm, so softly seal’d 
The first, last look by death reveal’d .” 1 

But no one who has seen how the traces of bitter¬ 
ness, disquietude, wrath and all unlovely passion die 
away from the face of the dead will call his language 
overstrained. This beauty is itself a suggestion of 
Immortality. 

Is it wrong to add that in the chamber of death 
yet another thought will occur to the watcher’s 
heart ? 

It is (if I may so speak of it) the thought of expec¬ 
tancy. I do not know how to describe it, but it is 
there. The spectacle of death is somehow not com¬ 
plete in itself. It points to a past, but to a future 
too. There is something unearthly — something 
prophetic — in the face of the dead. For upon it 
are written as by a Divine Hand the words Mors 
janua vita, “Death is the portal of life.” 

The language of religion answers to this intuition 
of the human heart. When it is said of the dead that 
“he is gone,” or that “he has been called away,” or 
that* “ God has taken him to Himself,” there is an 
implied belief in an existence following upon death. 

1 Byron, The Giaour. 


14 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


And not only so, but it is implied that that existence 
is stronger, better and more enduring than the life 
which the dead man lived before his death. In 
other words, it is implied that the immaterial part of 
him which survives and transcends death (however 
that part may be conceived) is superior to the 
material part which is soon or late dissolved and 
dissipated by death. 

For what is the change that death makes? 

The body of the dead remains as it was before; it 
is not less visible and tangible than it was; it pre¬ 
serves (for the time at least) all its members, bones, 
tissues, muscles, flesh and blood. Something has 
departed from it, something invisible and intangible, 
something that in the three 'sacred languages of men 
has been instinctively compared or identified with 
the mere breath (as the words tWM, tt vev/ia and anima 
serve to show), something that in its passing defies 
the keenest power of the microscope; and that 
something is the man himself. We say “ he is 
gone; ” for the soul is the man ; it is not only a part 
and the principal part of him, but in religious 
phraseology it is himself. 

It is not so always. In the early Greek world, 
where the belief in the soul was faint and shadowy, 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


!5 


the body was the man. Thus in the beginning of 
Homer’s Iliad\ as is well known, the poet laments 
the many valiant souls of men that “ divine 
Achilles ” 1 in his wrath sent down to Hades, “ but 
themselves ” he adds, meaning their bodies, “ made 
•he to be carrion for the dogs and all the fowls of the 
air.” What can be a greater difference between 
pagan and Christian thought than that to the one 
the body, and to the other the soul, should be the 
man ? To speak of a city as containing so many 
“souls” is to use the language of Christ. For it 
was Christ who set His seal upon the belief, to 
which the pagan thought of the East had long been 
tending, that the soul, and not the body, is the vital 
and essential part of a man, and is more than equiva¬ 
lent to all the possessions and adornments of which 
human nature is capable. “What shall it profit a 
man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his 
own soul ? ” “ What shall a man give in exchange 

for his soul ? ” Such is the soul in the Christian 
view, and the reason why the value of the soul is 
infinite is its Immortality. 

But to come back to the chamber of death: as 
soon as it is admitted that the soul is of higher 
1 Iliad, i. 3-5. 


- 16 THE HOPE OF IMMOR TAUT Y 

dignity than the body, and that it is separated and 
released from the body at death, the questions 
arise, What becomes of the soul after death ? does 
it survive and survive eternally ? and if so, what is 
the nature of its novel or extended life ? and how 
is its future conditioned by its past ? 

The Immortality of the soul is a doctrine standing 
by itself. It is independent of such theories as 
have been propounded, in ancient or modern times, 
respecting the destiny of souls after death. Immor¬ 
tality, apart from particular theories of its nature, 
is like a vast unexplored country; we know that 
the country exists; we touch its borders in the 
voyage of life; but no man has crossed these 
borders and recrossed them. So is it in the argu¬ 
ment of this essay with 

“ The undiscovered country from whose bourne 
No traveller returns.” 

That the future of the soul is veiled in darkness is 
an admission which all men must make. But the 
point upon which it is necessary to insist is that 
souls have a future. If the life of the soul ends in 
the hour of physical death, it is certain or highly 
probable that the discords of life cannot be har¬ 
monised. But assuming that the soul survives the 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


17 


death of the body, we are in possession of a truth 
that is invaluable. Life is then a mystery, unsolved 
as yet, but not insoluble. What will be God’s dealing 
with the soul in Immortality we know not; but we 
know that He will deal with it in accordance with 
His eternal attributes of justice, compassion and love. 

It is then the doctrine of Immortality, and that 
alone, which comes under consideration at present. 

But in considering the Immortality of the soul it 
will be well to begin by asking what is meant by 
“Immortality” and what is meant by “the soul.” 

Immortality is a negative term. It denies some¬ 
thing directly; it predicates something only indi¬ 
rectly. That is probably the reason why many 
thinkers who have agreed in making use of the 
term have not agreed upon its significance. They 
have believed in the Immortality of the soul, but 
they have not understood by “ Immortality ” the 
same thing. It will be right therefore to put aside 
such theories of Immortality as are contrary to the 
purpose of this essay. 

I. And of these the first is the great doctrine 
which has played so strange and so strong a part 
in the history of human thought—the doctrine 
of metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls, 
c 


C 


-l8 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

It has sometimes been ascribed originally to Pytha¬ 
goras. But it is of higher antiquity and authority. 
Herodotus 1 in his account of Egypt says explicitly 
that the Greek writers borrowed it from the Egyp¬ 
tians. Certainly it lies at the root of that remarkable 
practice, the worship of animals, which is almost 
the heart of the ancient Egyptian religious system. 
But it is found commonly among primitive and 
savage peoples, though so far separated as the North 
American Indians, the New Zealanders, the Lapps, 
the Mexicans, the Zulus and the negroes of the Gold 
Coast. It is one of the beliefs which descended intact 
from Brahminism to Buddhism; nay, it was en¬ 
nobled by the 550 births of the Buddha himself, and 
it was believed that in those births his soul passed 
not only into many human and animal forms but 
into a tree. It is a world-old notion which Western 
philosophers, like Pythagoras, inherited from the 
primitive East and scarcely made their own. Yet it 
has been revived even in modern times by Fourier 
and Fichte. It has been based partly upon Physics, 
partly upon Ethics. It has had strange results; for 
there can be little doubt that it originated the 
practice of abstinence from animal foods as a moral 

1 Herodotus ii. 123. 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


J 9 


duty. Wherever it has existed it has produced a 
noble tenderness of man towards the lower animals. 
It has been thought to meet the scientific law of 
conservation of energy. It has been accepted by 
sensitive and scrupulous minds as answering to the 
requirements of the Divine equity. But it is essen¬ 
tially a philosophical doctrine, not a doctrine of 
religion. It is tinged with the mysticism, the specu¬ 
lative unreality, which Oriental philosophy loves. 
It robs any particular life, and so life itself, of its 
unique dignity. It does not place the soul after 
death in any closer or more vital relation to its 
Creator. It affords no security, or no adequate 
security, for the final harmony between the soul 
and the conditions of its being. It has never been 
widely accepted, and it is now pretty generally re¬ 
jected in the Western world; and however great 
may be the historical and speculative interest at¬ 
taching to it, it is not the doctrine advocated in 
this Essay. 

Nor again is the Immortality of the soul as here 
considered anything but a personal, individual Im¬ 
mortality. 

II. There may no doubt be an Immortality which 
is not individual or in which individuality is sub- 


C 


20 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


merged. The absorption of the individual soul 
after death in the Universal Soul of which it is 
an emanation is a belief which, if not primarily 
religious, is yet not alien from religion. It is 
ancient, as all ideas respecting the soul seem to be 
ancient. It was the teaching of Anaxagoras among 
Greek philosophers. The Greek and Roman poets 
not seldom make allusion to it, although somewhat 
obscurely. Thus Euripides says, “The mind (vovs) 
of the dead is not alive, yet hath it immortal con¬ 
sciousness, when it hath been merged in the 
immortal ether.” 1 And again, “ Let each depart 
into the element from which it came, the spirit to 
the ether, the body to the earth.” 2 Similarly Vir¬ 
gil 3 speaks of the Deity who pervades the earth and 
the wide ocean and the vault of heaven, the Deity 
from whom the flocks and herds and men and all 
wild beasts do draw at birth the subtle, vital air, 
and into whom at length they all return and are 
resolved. 

But it is in the writings of the Stoics that the 
doctrine of the Universal Soul becomes most fre¬ 
quent and authoritative. Thus Epictetus says of 
death : “ God gives the signal for retreat, opens the 

1 Helena, 1014. 2 Suppiices, 532. 3 * Georgies , iv. 221-226. 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


21 


door and says to you, Go. Go whither ? To 
nothing terrible, but to the place from which you 
came, to your friends and kinsmen, to the elements : 
what there was in you of fire goes to fire; of earth 
to earth ; of air (spirit) to air ( ocrov Trvev/iaTLov ek 
7 rvevfjLarLov ); of water to water; no Hades nor Ache¬ 
ron nor Cocytus nor Pyriphlegethon, but all is full 
of Gods and Daemons.” 1 So, too, Marcus Aurelius : 
“If souls continue to exist, how does the air con¬ 
tain them from Eternity ? But how does the earth 
contain the bodies of those who have been buried 
from time so remote? For, as here, the mutation 
of these bodies after a certain continuance, whatever 
it may be, and their dissolution make room for other 
dead bodies, so the souls which are removed into 
the air after subsisting for some time are transmuted 
and diffused and assume a fiery nature by being 
received into the seminal intelligence of the Uni¬ 
verse, and in this way make room for the fresh 
souls which come to dwell there.” 2 

The Stoics were indeed divided in opinion, some 
holding that the individual soul would at death be 

1 The Discourses of Epictetus , translated by Long. Book iii., 
chap. 13. 

2 The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus , translated 
by Long. Book iv., § 21. 


22 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


immediately reabsorbed into the Universal Soul, 
others that it would retain its individuality until 
the final conflagration, which was an article of the 
Stoic creed, and would then be reabsorbed; but 
that the individual soul, as it had emanated from 
the Universal Soul, so into it would be soon or 
late reabsorbed, was a general doctrine of the Stoic 
philosophy. 

It is curious that this doctrine of the soul’s sur¬ 
vival after death, i.e. y of its temporary survival as 
distinct from its Immortality, has been asserted in 
modern times by some few thinkers, though they 
have expressed themselves rather hesitatingly, and 
the ultimate destiny of the soul as they conceived it, 
where it has fallen short of Immortality, has been 
not reabsorption but annihilation. They are chiefly 
the religious thinkers who, while postulating Im¬ 
mortality for the souls of the virtuous, have seemed to 
find by a strange rational process, in the idea that 
other souls would enjoy a qualified or limited 
Immortality (if it may be so spoken of), a halfway 
house between Immortality which they conceived as 
being the recompense of virtue, and annihilation as 
the penal destiny of vice. But they have been few, 
and it has been felt that they have been driven into 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


2 3 


a logical difficulty by their denial of the absolute 
Immortality of all souls. 

The doctrine of reabsorption, or in other words 
the belief that the individual soul is in the moment 
of death reabsorbed into the Universal Soul, stands 
on firmer philosophical ground, and it has been 
held even by some Christian authorities. In one of 
Schleiermacher’s letters (which has lately been 
quoted by Dr. Martineau 1 ) an attempt is made to 
present the doctrine as if it were equivalent to the 
truth revealed by Christ. To a lady whose heart 
was torn by longing for personal reunion in the 
future life with the young husband taken from her 
soon after their marriage, he wrote: “ When your 
imagination brings before you the idea of a melting 
away into the great All, let it not, dear child, lay on 
you any touch of bitter sorrow. Do but think of it 
as a merging not into death, but into life, and that 
the highest life. It is indeed that after which we all 
strive in this life, only that we never reach it, viz., to 
live simply in the Divine Whole to which we belong, 
and to put away from us the pretension to set up for 
ourselves, as if we could be our own. If he now is 


1 A Study of Religion, vol. ii., pp. 335 sqq. 


24 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


living in God, and you love him eternally in God, as 
you loved and knew God in him, can you think of 
anything sublimer and more glorious ? Is not this 
the highest end of love, in comparison with which 
everything which clings only to the personal life and 
arises thence is nothing ? ” 

Such is the doctrine of reabsorption, as put for¬ 
ward by one whose life was illuminated by many 
beautiful graces of the Christian character; and if 
any one could recommend it by personal authority, 
it would be he. Philosophically, indeed, it is 
incontestable. But it is not the doctrine so dear 
to human hearts. It breaks down just where it is 
most needed as a satisfaction for the sorrows and 
shortcomings of Humanity. All the comfort which 
the doctrine of Immortality affords is dependent 
upon the continuance of individuality. To lose 
individuality — to be merged, soon or late, in the 
Infinite Whole, is, according to the conscience of 
men, to forfeit the boon of the Immortal Life. It is 
Pantheism, not Christianity. It touches the mind, 
but it cannot touch the heart. By the graveside, 
where the mourners lay their loved ones to rest, it is 
felt to be impotent and vain. It is such doctrine as 
may issue from the life of a Spinoza, but it fails in 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


25 


the presence of Christ. It is not the doctrine for 
which this Essay is a plea. 

III. Again, the Immortality for which I plead is 
not conditional but absolute. I do not urge that 
Immortality is attainable, but that it is actual; not 
that it is partial, but that it is universal; not that it 
may be, but that it is. It has been already intimated 
that some modern thinkers, under the pressure of 
logical difficulties which they had commonly made 
for themselves, have been led to argue, though as a 
rule faintheartedly, for a conditional Immortality, 
i.e., for the Immortality of some souls under certain 
conditions and not of all souls intrinsically. But 
this, too, is an old-world theory, like so many others. 
No idea is more usual among savage peoples, where 
Immortality is believed in at all, than that it is 
certain privileged souls alone which will be 
Immortal. But while Immortality, if regarded as 
conditional, has in the modern world been as¬ 
sumed to be the privilege of virtue, it was 
assumed by savage peoples to be the privilege of 
rank. For to savages who are naturally disposed to 
look upon the future life not as a compensation or 
retribution for the present, but as a mere contin¬ 
uation of the present life (the idea of future 


26 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


retribution being much later) it seems a thing of 
course that the aristocracy of the world which they 
know should be prolonged into the world which 
they do not know; and as existence after death is 
itself in their eyes a privilege, and not (as in 
this world) a common possession, they conclude 
that the warriors and chiefs will live again, but 
the common people will lie in their graves 
eternally. 

It is true that this belief is not consistently main¬ 
tained ; sometimes the kinsfolk or servants of a 
chief, or even his animals, are said to possess a life 
immortal as his own. But the reason of their 
Immortality will be found to lie not in their nature 
but in their relation to the master whom they serve; 
and it is in order to do him service that they are 
gifted with Immortality, as when the faithful dog of 
the Red Indian warrior was slain by his grave in the 
belief that, when he came to the happy hunting 
grounds of the Blessed, he would find his dog at 
his side. Such practices as Suttee in India are 
witnesses to the belief in this Immortality (if I may 
call it so) of relation. They do not signify the 
Immortality of all men — still less of all living 
creatures; but they enhance the power and dignity 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


2 7 


of the Immortality inherent in the great men. That 
Immortality, as has been said, belongs to greatness, 
not to goodness. 

But modern thought, in so far as it has made 
Immortality conditional, has found its condition in 
virtue. It is the good who live for ever; the 
wicked perish. That is the doctrine of some theo¬ 
logians ; it is the tacit assumption of a good many 
Christians. It may be supported (like almost any 
other belief) by isolated passages of Holy Scripture, 
though the interpreters of these passages have 
sometimes confused the final destruction of evil, 
which is an admittedly Christian, doctrine, with 
the destruction of individual sinners; but it runs 
counter to the teaching of Scripture as a whole. 
We shall see hereafter what has been the attitude 
of the Church and of the most eminent of the 
Fathers towards the doctrine of conditional Im¬ 
mortality. It is enough to say now that it could 
not be believed by any Christian except upon the 
authority of direct Revelation. For the idea of 
a conditional Immortality — i.e., of an Immortality 
which may or may not be, and which is the 
attribute of some but not of all — cuts away the main 
supports of the belief in Immortality itself. For 


28 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


apart from Revelation (which is out of court in a 
general religious argument) the belief in the Im¬ 
mortality of the soul principally depends upon the 
soul’s intrinsic nature. It is because Immortality 
is the natural property of the human soul that 
the thought of its destruction is intolerable and 
impossible. Neither philosophy nor religion 
possesses the means (apart from Revelation) of 
making a distinction between souls in respect of 
their Immortality. The argument which proves 
the soul immortal, proves all souls immortal. 
“The unconditional destiny of all men,” says 
Bishop Martensen, “ is Immortality.” 1 But what 
becomes of this destiny, if Immortality is con¬ 
ditioned by human merit or demerit, if it is the 
lot of some souls and not of others, if it is not 
an absolute intrinsic quality of human nature ? 
No doubt a direct revelation, if it were explicit 
and authoritative, might prove what is called 
conditional Immortality, but it would destroy 
nearly all the evidences for Immortality except 
that of the revelation itself. It is the object of 
this essay to show, as far as possible, that the 
soul which is in every man is immortal. 

1 Christian Dogmatics, § 274. 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


29 


IV. But if the various theories of Immortality 
which have been considered are thus put aside, it can 
hardly be necessary to say that there is no room 
within the scope of this Essay for that strange 
illogical view of the Immortal Life which is taught 
in the Positivist Creed. “ Words,” says Bacon, 
“ as a Tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the 
understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle 
and pervert the judgment, so as it is almost 
necessary in all controversies and disputations to 
imitate the wisdom of the mathematicians in set¬ 
ting down in the very beginning the definitions 
of our words and terms, that others may know 
how we accept and understand them, and whether 
they concur with us or no.” But I know no 
more striking example of the influence which 
words, even when the life is gone out of them, 
still exercise upon the human .mind than that the 
word “Immortality,” like the word “religion” itself 
should be cherished and usurped by thinkers, 
who have robbed it of all its native force and 
dignity. 

Comte himself indeed, in speaking of the Posi¬ 
tivist Immortality, or (as he preferred to call it) 
“the subjective life,” generally employed language 


30 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


that veiled its paradox in a certain sentimental 
ambiguity. Thus, in reference to the cry of 
Danton on the scaffold, “ Perish my memory, only 
let my country be free! ” he says : “ Even in this 
heroic cry we trace the idea that the outward 
reward of a great life extends to its subjective 
Immortality. He who has truly lived for others 
should hope to live on, in and by others. This 
subjective return is purer at once and surer than 
the objective, for it carries on the services rendered 
and perfects the judgment of those services. Under 
the impulse given by the Positivist spirit, spontane¬ 
ously and systematically, this noble recompense is 
accessible to all who are capable of understanding 
it and deserving it.” 1 

Comte’s disciples have, as often happens, gone 

beyond their master ; they have filled in his shadowy 
outlines of religion, they have clothed his skeleton 
of Immortality in the phrases of a beautiful and 
touching poetry. It is to this investiture that it 

owes what grace or charm it has. Many persons 

who would scorn such an Immortality as Comte 
offers find an echo in their hearts (and it is a 

1 System of Positive Polity , vol. iv., chap, i., p. 45, Congreve’s 
Translation. 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


31 


nobly unselfish echo) to George Eliot’s eloquent 
lines — 

“ 0 may I join the choir invisible, 

Of those immortal dead who live again 
In minds made better by their presence, . . . 

. So to live is heaven. 

To make undying music in the world, 

Breathing as beauteous order that controls 
With growing sway the growing life of man. 

. . . . This is life to come, 

Which martyred men have made more glorious 
For us who strive to follow.” 

and what they appreciate they fancy they believe. 
But this is not a doctrine which can bear the 
scrutiny of close thought. It is playing with 
names, playing with facts. It is taking, or trying 
to take, the shadow for the substance. An Im¬ 
mortality of being remembered is no Immortality 
except in metaphor. Regret is not life; and even 
if it were, what would then be the Immortality of 
those souls (than whom none are more .sacred upon 
earth) whose virtue is never heard of nor ever dreamt 
of—the souls that live and die in obscurity and 
do good by stealth and suffer many things for 
others, though they thank them not and often 
revile them, and are only seen by Him who “seeth 
in secret”? The Positivist Creed fails; for it makes 


3 2 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


Immortality to depend upon the judgment of men, 
and for the most part we judge each other wrongly 
if at all. It is not for a hope like this that the 
heart of Man is athirst; and I put it aside in this 
essay. 

The Immortality for which I plead is the per¬ 
sonal, intrinsic, inalienable, eternal attribute of every 
individual soul of man. But what is the soul? 

This is evidently an important question; it is 
the most important question with which this Essay 
deals. For the doctrine that the soul survives 
after death, and survives eternally, possesses little 
value, unless it be known what is the nature of 
the soul. But if the nature of the soul as it is in 
itself, without regard to limiting material conditions, 
is ascertained, it will be possible to form some 
estimate of the life that is proper to the soul when 
emancipated from the body. 

Human nature is divisible into parts. It is not 
necessary to consider whether the division is 
ultimately reasonable or not. We are not consid¬ 
ering human nature as it is in the sight of God; we 
are considering it as men speak and think of it. 

The common speech of mankind treats body 
and soul together as the equivalent of Man’s 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


33 


whole being. If it is said that a person is ruined 
“body and soul,” the meaning is that the ruin is 
complete. 

About the word “body” there is no doubt or 
difficulty. It has always and everywhere signified 
the same thing. But the English word “soul,” 
or the word which corresponds to it in some other 
languages, has not always been used in the same 
sense. We do not, it would seem, use it uniformly 
even now. Thus it may be doubted whether we 
mean the same thing, i.e., the same part of man’s 
composite being, when we say that a person’s soul 
is given to music or art, as when we say that his 
soul is in God’s keeping. 

The only way of arriving at a definition of the 
word “ soul ” is, I think, to examine it historically. 

The philosophers of ancient Greece were the 
first persons who occupied themselves with the 
scientific and logical treatment of the soul. The 
Greek word usually translated “soul”—the word 
^r v XV — was not yet solidified when it came into 
the hands of Plato and Aristotle; it was in a sort 
of fluid state, and they could more or less mould 
it at will. Still it possessed a certain definite signi¬ 
fication. 


34 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


Greek thought recognised in human nature body 
and soul. It understood by the body the material 
substance which is visible and tangible, and which 
is laid after death in the grave. It understood by 
the soul all that is not body. But for a long time 
it did not inquire how the non-corporeal part of 
human nature should be defined. 

It is clear, however, that, if the ^jrvxv or “soul” 
were an equivalent expression for all that is not 
corporeal in human nature, it would possess a 
very wide range of meaning. It might be pre¬ 
dicated of beings, and even of inanimate things, 
which would not be looked upon in the modern 
world as having souls. Thus Aristotle quotes a 
saying of Thales, the first of the celebrated Seven 
Wise Men of Greece, that “the magnet must have 
a soul (- yjrvxv ), for it attracts iron.” He himself 
speaks of the “ soul ” (^xv) of a plant, under¬ 
standing no more by it than the vital principle, 
which is the source of growth and fertility. 
Similarly he speaks of the “soul” of an animal, 
as, e.g., of a horse or a dog; and here the ^rvxv 
is higher and nobler than in a plant, as it includes 
not life alone but instinct, appetite and affection ; 
but it is not yet all that is understood by “ soul ” to- 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


35 


day. It would be difficult to put the Aristotelian 
view more exactly than in Grotes words, “The 
varieties of soul are distributed into successive 
stages, gradually narrowing in extension and 
enlarging in comprehension; the first or lowest 
stage being co-extensive with the whole, but con¬ 
noting only two or three simple attributes; the 
second or next above connoting all these and more 
besides, but denoting only part of the individuals 
denoted by the first; the third connoting all this 
and more, but denoting yet fewer individuals, and 
so forward. Thus the concrete individuals, called 
living bodies, include all plants as well as all 
animals; but the soul, called Nutritive by Aristotle, 
corresponding thereto connotes only nutrition, 
growth, decay, and generation of another similar 
individual. In the second stage, plants are left out, 
but all animals remain; the Sentient soul, belonging 
to animals but not belonging to any plants, connotes 
all the functions and faculties of the Nutritive 
soul, together with sensible perception (at least 
in its rudest shape) besides. We proceed onward 
in the same direction, taking in additional faculties 
— the Movent, Appetitive, Phantastic (Imaginative) 
Noetic (Intelligent) soul, and thus diminishing the 


36 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

total of individuals denoted. But each higher 
variety of soul continues to possess all the faculties 
of the lower. Thus the Sentient soul cannot exist 
without comprehending all the faculties of the 
Nutritive, though the Nutritive exists (in plants) 
without any admixture of the Sentient. Again, the 
Sentient soul does not necessarily possess, either 
memory, imagination, or intellect (Nods), but no 
soul can be either Imaginative or Noetic without 
being Sentient as well as Nutritive. The Noetic 
soul, as the highest of all, retains in itself all the 
lower faculties, but these are found to exist apart 
from it.” 1 

There is then a or “ soul ” of men as well 

as of the lower animals or of plants, and it is in a 
fuller sense a soul; for it is the seat not of the vital 
principle only nor of the appetite and affection only, 
but of the rational and moral faculties. Aristotle 
calls it the intelligent or ratiocinative soul. It is 
the part of human nature which in the Aristotelian 
philosophy is supreme. 

As a Greek, although the wisest of the Greeks, 
Aristotle recognised, and could recognise, nothing 
higher than this intellectual soul. His philoso- 

1 Grote, Aristotle, vol. ii., chap, xii., p. 191. 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


37 


phical doctrine of the soul is the highest of which 
Greek thought was capable. 

It can now be seen that the ^v^r) or “ soul ” as 
conceived by the Greeks possessed three several 
meanings, which may be ranged, as it were, in an 
ascending scale of dignity. If it were necessary 
to find English equivalents for them (though the 
equivalence cannot be exact), they might perhaps 
be taken as “life,” “sense,” and “reason.” For 
“life” may naturally represent the vital principle, 
“ sense ” the emotional, and “ reason ” the intel¬ 
lectual or ratiocinative. But in the Greek, and 
specially the Aristotelian uses of “ soul,” the higher 
meaning, as it was developed, included the lower; 
it was not something generically different from the 
lower, but was always that and something added 
to it, and although the something so added was 
infinitely the greater part of the soul in its new 
meaning, it was not the whole. 

Thus the of a plant'was its life, or, more 

strictly, its principle of growth and fertility. 

The yjrvxv °f an animal was its life plus its sen¬ 
tient or appetitive principle; it was primarily the 
sense and only in a secondary degree the life, but 
strictly considered it was made up of both. 


38 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


The -y/rvxv of a man was his life or vital prin¬ 
ciple and his sentient or appetitive principle, but 
it was above all his intellectual principle or, 
reason. 

Beyond this point, as has been said, the Greek 
thought, and therefore the Greek conception of 
the soul, did not go. The reason was the “end” 
or supreme part of human nature. 

If we pass now to the Hebrew Scriptures, as 
interpreted by the harmonious voices of the Jewish 
and Christian religions, we are struck by a differ¬ 
ence in the conception or estimate of human nature. 
It corresponds to the difference between the Greek 
and the Hebrew characters. To the Greek, reason 
was the highest thing; its supremacy could not 
be disputed. But it was not the highest thing 
to the Hebrew. He had not apprehended the 
supreme truths of life, nor did he expect any one 
to apprehend them, by a process of the reason. 
“ Canst thou by wisdom find out God ? ” is a 
question issuing from the very heart of Jewish 
religious thought. No Jew could have hesitated as 
to the answer which it required. The desire of the 
Jewish nation was for God. The Hebrew psalmists 
and prophets give repeated expression to that desire. 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


39 


“As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks,” i.e., 
as the hart pursued by huntsmen on the mountains 
longs for a refreshing draught, “ so panteth my 
soul after Thee, O God .” 1 “O God, Thou art my 
God; early will I seek Thee: my soul thirsteth for 
Thee, my flesh longeth for Thee, in a dry and thirsty 
land where no water is .” 2 But it was not reason 
which inspired, or could satisfy, the passion of the 
Hebrew soul for God. In the Hebrew view, reason, 
if it stood by itself, neither prevented nor ensured 
the knowledge of God. It was in another way, 
by another faculty than the reason, that God and 
Divine things came to be known. What that 
faculty was the Scriptures of the Old Testament 
intimate, though but faintly; in the New Testament 
it is defined and explained. 

We shall find the explanation in St. Paul’s 
writings. 

The theology of St. Paul may be said to represent 
the Hebrew conception of human nature in its 
highest form. St. Paul was by birth and education 
a Jew, but he had studied in the Greek University 
of Tarsus, and he was familiar with the language 
and literature of Greece. The limitations of his 

1 Psalm xlii. I. 2 Psalm lxiii. I. 


40 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


intellectual scope had been enlarged by philosophy, 
but his imagination was controlled by religious awe. 
In him therefore, far better than in Philo, Hebrew 
and Greek thought found a meeting-place. Consid¬ 
ering that St. Paul had never spoken to and indeed 
had never seen in the flesh the Master to whose 
service he consecrated his life, I think his intel¬ 
lectual influence upon Christian theology (though 
sometimes exaggerated, as by Renan) ought to be 
regarded as one of the marvels of speculative 
history. But his intellectual powers were sublime; 
he scanned with penetrating vision the depths of 
Divine truth; the eighteen centuries of Christianity 
have not exhausted the profundity of his teaching; 
and apart altogether from the spiritual intuitions 
and revelations which he claimed as his personal 
experiences, it is doubtful if the Christian or pagan 
world has ever produced a thinker of more acute 
and subtle intellect than his. 

$t. Paul’s view of human nature is different from 
Aristotle’s. In his view human nature consists of 
three parts or elements, which are distinct. 

The first of these is the or “body,” and it is 
what has been always understood by the body. 

The second is the ^jrvxv or “ soul,” including the 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


41 


life, the sense, the affection or appetite and the 
reason. 

The third is the 7 rvev^a or “spirit,” i.e., the fac¬ 
ulty by which Man apprehends God. 

It appears, then, that St. Paul adds the “spirit” or 
spiritual part of human nature to the parts enumer¬ 
ated by Aristotle. That is the difficulty which, as 
the Hebrew Scriptures implicitly taught, places 
Man in relation to his Maker. And as constituting 
or creating this Divine relation, that faculty is in 
human nature supreme. 

It is important to observe what a light this tripar¬ 
tition of human nature seems to shed upon the 
facts of human life and human thought. 

The three parts are logically distinct; each exists 
and may be developed independently of the others. 
To assume that the cultivation of one part necessa¬ 
rily improves or corroborates the others, or either 
of the others, is to misunderstand the Pauline 
theology. 

Suppose, e.g.y that the body of a man is developed 
by exercise and discipline; the development is a 
good thing in itself, but it does not necessarily or 
naturally imply a corresponding development of the 
soul (ylrvxv)- Thus a man may be a brilliant athlete 


42 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


but a poor thinker. It is not said that athletic 
energy and logical acumen are not found together, 
they may or may not coexist; it is enough that the 
one does not imply the other. 

Or, again, suppose that the soul and especially 
that part of it which is highest, viz., the reason, is 
fully developed; the development is good in itself, 
but it does not imply a corresponding development 
of the irveviia or “ spirit.” Just as the athlete is not 
necessarily a thinker, so the thinker is not neces¬ 
sarily a saint. 

It may indeed be suggested, not without some 
apparent reason, that the equal and simultaneous 
culture of all the parts of human nature is itself a 
difficulty, and that, where one is highly cultivated, 
the others are apt to be proportionately enfeebled. 
But this suggestion St. Paul does not make. His 
argument turns simply upon the way in which 
Humanity becomes cognisant of Divine truth. He 
is not concerned with historical revelations, which 
are evidently liable, in some at least of their aspects, 
to the judgment of the intellect, but with the per¬ 
sonal consciousness of God. He realises the fact, 
not less conspicuous in modern than in ancient 
times, that, where two persons possess equal ability, 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


43 


equal information and equal character, to one the 
Being of God may be a doubt or a paradox or an 
absurdity, and to the other it may be the most 
luminous of truths. The line of demarcation 
between these persons and between others like 
them, whatever it is, is not intellectual; but the one 
is religious because he possesses, and the other is 
non-religious because he does not possess, some¬ 
thing that is not intellect, and yet ex hypothesi can 
sit in judgment upon a problem of the soul. 

That something is the faculty which St. Paul 
calls TTvev/jia or “ spirit.” 

The relation of the Spirit of God to the spirit 
or spiritual faculty in Man, is a cardinal matter in 
the Pauline theology. It can only be alluded to here. 

Between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man 
there is in St. Paul’s view a correspondence or 
intercommunion. The Divine Spirit “beareth wit¬ 
ness with our spirit, that we are the children of 
God.” The Divine Spirit “helpeth our infirmi¬ 
ties.” He “maketh intercession for us .” 1 He is 
the earnest as He is the attestation of the future 
blessings reserved for those who are called the 
“saints” or the “sons of God.” 


1 Romans viii. 16, 26. 


44 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


But the activity of the Divine Spirit in the souls 
of men is contingent upon the sympathetic activity 
of the spiritual faculty in men themselves. The 
spiritual faculty may be cultivated, illumined, 
purified by human co-operation with the Divine 
Spirit until men enjoy the perfect vision of God. Or, 
again, it may be starved and atrophied by neglect; 
then men become at last incapable of seeing Him. 

For “the natural” (or psychical) “man” in St. 
Paul’s words, i.e., the ^v^i/cos avOpcoTros, the man of 
^ V XV or “soul,” but not of irvev^a or “spirit,” 
“ receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, . . . 
neither can he know them, because they are spir¬ 
itually discerned.” 1 To one whose spiritual faculty 
is dead the Being of God is as sunlight to the 
blind, or as music to the deaf. But to the spir¬ 
itual man it is the truth of truths, the joy of 
joys. 

This is St. Paul’s philosophical account of human 
nature. Thus, in his view, the trinity of human 
nature is complete. Man — the three in one — is 
made in the image of the Triune God. “I pray 
God,” he says, writing to the Thessalonians of 
human nature regarded as a v/hole, “your whole 

1 1 Corinthians ii. 14. 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


45 

spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto 
the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ .” 1 

It would seem proper, then, to speak of human 
nature as threefold, and no doubt that is the strictly 
philosophical, as it is also the strictly religious, 
manner of speech ; but the tripartition is not always 
observed. For yjrvxrj or “ soul ” may denote all that 
is not spiritual in human nature; it may be set as 
a single comprehensive term against 7 rvedfia or 
“ spirit,” and then, but only then, it includes the 
body. Or yjrv^ri may be, and often is, used in con¬ 
trast with ccbfjia, to denote all the parts of human 
nature that are not in themselves visible and mate¬ 
rial ; and in this use it includes not the life only, nor 
the life and the appetite only, nor the life, the 
appetite and the reason only, but the spirit. It 
is so when “ body and soul ” are treated as repre¬ 
sentative of the whole human being. It is so, when 
the soul is taken, as in our Lord’s teaching, to signify 
the part which is most sacred and sublime in human 
nature; for that is clearly not the appetite or the 
reason, but the spirit, the eternal element, the part 
which is immediately related to God. 

We see, then, that the word or “soul,” 

1 1 Thessalonians v. 23. 


4 6 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

possesses two meanings, a narrower meaning in 
which it stands for the life, the appetite and the 
reason, and a larger meaning in which it includes 
the spirit as well. Nay, the spirit is so transcend- 
ently important in view of Immortality that, when 
it is included, it tends to overshadow the other 
attributes or faculties of human nature, it usurps 
or tends to usurp to itself the whole meaning of 
“soul.” This is the case in the Greek language, but 
it is the case in English also. When we speak of 
a man’s “soul,” or of his “spirit,” we generally 
mean the same thing, i.e., the part of him which is 
invisible and immortal. We may say indiscrimi¬ 
nately that in death his “ soul ” has departed, or his 
“spirit.” So true is this that while the body has an 
adjective “bodily” corresponding to it, and the spirit 
has “spiritual,” there is in English no adjective 
corresponding to “soul”; for “psychical” is a late 
invention and its meaning is not in fact co-extensive 
with the “soul.” The adjective “spiritual” does 
duty for the soul as well as the spirit in many uses, 
because the “spirit” and the “soul” of a man as 
commonly understood are one and the same. It is 
convenient, however, as well as correct, to make a 
distinction between them. In this Essay, when I 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


47 


speak of “ spirit,” I shall mean the spiritual faculty 
alone ; when I speak of “ soul,” I shall mean the 
whole invisible, immaterial part of human nature, i.e., 
the life, the sense, the reason and the spirit. For 
the union of life, sense and reason, apart from the 
spirit, there is no English word. Perhaps the word 
least inappropriate would be “nature.” 

The distinction between the soul, or more properly 
the being, and the spirit is not essential, as will, I 
think, appear, in the treatment of human Immor¬ 
tality. Still, it cannot be ignored without some loss. 

It is now possible to ask, What is the element or 
part of human nature which is believed to survive 
the grave and to last for ever ? The answer to 
that question will throw a light upon the nature of 
Immortality itself. For the scope or destiny of the 
Immortal Life must apparently be determined by 
the nature of the subject which is endowed with 
Immortality. The ancient story of Tithonus, who 
was said to have obtained the gift of eternal life, but 
not of eternal youth, is a witness that Immortality 
l is not a boon, unless certain graces or faculties are 
implied in it. In other words, Immortality is con¬ 
ditioned by the nature of the immortal being. 

What is it, then, which survives or is immortal? 


48 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

In order to see what is the immortal part of human 
nature, it will be well to refer once more, however 
briefly, to the contrast between the pagan and 
Christian conceptions of Immortality. In the pagan 
world the thought of Immortality or of the soul’s 
survival after death, even when it was accepted as 
possible or probable, inspired no happiness. There 
was no anticipation or exultation in the prospect of 
a future life. The best and wisest of the ancient 
Greeks, with the possible exception of a few philo¬ 
sophers, such as Socrates, if it had been open to 
them to choose or refuse the gift of Immortality, 
would have refused it. That Immortality could be 
the satisfaction of human desires, or the compen¬ 
sation for human sufferings, or the reward of human 
virtues, was an idea that did not occur to them, and 
would not have been intelligible to their minds. 
Immortality did not appear to them as a joyful 
hope, but as a bad dream, or a painful necessity, 
or at the best a tolerable fate. 

Let me illustrate this feeling of the pagan world 
by quoting two passages taken, as it were, the one 
from the dawn, the other from the sunset of clas¬ 
sical literature. 

It is well known how in the Odyssey of Homer 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


49 


Odysseus goes down to the lower world, and, meet¬ 
ing Achilles there, seeks to comfort him in his 
death, by telling him that, as he had been honoured 
like a god while he lived upon the earth, so, too, he 
was a mighty prince among the dead. But Achilles 
makes answer — 

“ Speak not comfortably to me of death, O great 
Odysseus. Rather would I live on ground as the 
hireling of another, with a landless man who has 
no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the 
dead that be departed .” 1 

What a witness is such language as this to the 
gloom of the destiny (as Homer conceived it) 
reserved in the after-life for the most exalted and 
distinguished of mankind! 

The other passage shall be the familiar address of 
the Emperor Hadrian to his own departing soul, an 
address which has often been translated; but it may 
here be given in the original Latin, and in the 
English of Matthew Prior. 

“ Animula vagula blandula 
Hospes comesque corporis, 

Quae nunc abibis in loca 
Pallidula, rigida, nudula, 

Nec, ut soles, dabis jocos?” 


1 Odyssey , xi. 489. The translation is that of Messrs. Butcher and 
Lang. 

E 



5 <> 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


“ Poor little pretty fluttering thing, 

Must we no longer live together? 

And dost thou prune thy trembling wing; 

To take thy flight, thou know’st not whither? 

Thy humorous vein, thy pleasing folly, 

Lies all neglected, all forgot; 

And pensive, wavering, melancholy, 

Thou dread’st and hop’st thou know’st not what.” 

Can any words be more sorrowful or more hope¬ 
less ? There is in them no sense of gain, but all 
is loss. The very diminutives imply the vanity of 
the soul’s existence. Not a word suggests that the 
soul, as soon as it is emancipated from the body, 
will enter upon a larger life. It is earth which is 
heaven to the Emperor ; the future is darkness. How 
strange, too, how significant is the phrase, 

“ Nec, ut soles, dabis jocos,” 

as if the highest quality of the soul were “ pleasing 
folly ” ! 

Is it possible to explain the gloom which hangs 
as a pall over the anticipation of a future life from 
the beginning to the end of pagan history ? 

The explanation lies in the conception of the 
soul. In Homer’s poetry the soul which is deemed 
to survive the body is little more than the mere vital 
principle. The life of Achilles, “the divine son of 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


51 

Peleus,” in Hades is a life of mere existence, a life 
without powers or passions, a life that is only a 
shadow of the earthly life. But a life devoid of 
hope, solace, affection or imagination can scarce 
be regarded as a boon. It is a life of the ^rv^rj 
in its lowest, or all but its lowest, sense. 

Nor is it to a much higher level of religious 
philosophy that the Emperor Hadrian’s thought 
ascends so late as in the second century of the 
Christian era. He, too, looks for existence, but 
for little more. His soul, when it leaves the body 
whose guest and companion it has been, will lack 
the warmth, the grace, the joyousness which have 
clothed it in life. The Emperor Hadrian was not 
an ordinary man; he had played a great part in 
history, his mind had been elevated by dignity and 
solemnised by responsibility, and this was his whole 
idea of the life after death. What could the future 
seem to him but dark and sad ? His voice is the 
highest perhaps of political paganism. He believed 
(if indeed he did believe) in a life reaching beyond 
the grave, but it was a life bereft of all that makes 
this life worth living, and in spite of himself he 
shrank from it with pain. 

Homer and Hadrian may be taken as representing 


5 2 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


the general sentiment of the pagan world at different 
stages in regard to the prospect of the soul’s Immor¬ 
tality. But they do not represent the highest specu¬ 
lation. The religious teachers of classical antiquity 
were not the priests; they were first the poets, and 
afterwards the philosophers. Let us then appeal to 
the greatest and best of the philosophers, to Socrates. 

The teaching of Socrates upon the future of the 
soul is represented, at its highest elevation, by the 
Platonic dialogue which bears the name of his 
beloved disciple, the Phcedo. The Phcedo stands 
among the masterpieces of human literature. It 
is one of those works in which the perfect harmony 
of the subject, and of the circumstances in which 
it is treated, create an indelible impression. “ No¬ 
body,” says Socrates, with his quiet irony, “can 
pretend that I am talking of what does not concern 
me at this time.” And the dignity of Socrates him¬ 
self, his impressive serenity, his love of philosophical 
discussion, strong even in death, his abiding personal 
faith in the future of wise and holy souls, have 
united to win for the Dialogue of the Immortal Life, 
as the Phcedo may be justly called, an Immortality 
as true as the subject with which it deals. 

But it is not with the Socratic arguments for 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


53 


Immortality that I am concerned ; they will claim 
consideration in a later chapter. It is with the nature 
of Immortality as Socrates conceived it. 

The soul which Socrates in the Phcedo called 
immortal is not the soul or spirit of the Christian 
doctrine. It is more than the vital principle, but 
less than the spiritual principle, in man; it is the 
mind, the seat of the desire, affection, and reason, 
but chiefly of the reason; for in the eyes of Socrates 
the reason was the highest of human faculties; to 
know right was necessarily to do it; dialectic was 
the end of life, and dialectical communion with the 
elect souls in the world beyond the grave was the 
supreme intellectual satisfaction. He who thought 
that virtue was knowledge could look for no higher 
end than the perfecting of knowledge by discussion. 
Rational existence, existence chastened and elevated 
by reason, was the goal, as of his belief, so also of 
his desire. Thus it was that his anticipation of the 
future life was not, like the pagan poet’s, sombre 
and regretful, nor like the Christian saint’s, rap¬ 
turous and ecstatic; it was simply and calmly 
acquiescent in a destiny, which, if it were not a 
dream, would surely in the nature of things be 
better, as being more rational, more intellectual, 


54 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


than the present. But it might be a dream, and the 
fear that it might be is apparent in the Phcedo , un¬ 
derlying the very arguments that seek to dispel it; 
and in the Apology the last words of Socrates are 
these: “The hour of departure has arrived, and we 
go our ways, I to die, and you to live. Which is 
better God only knows.” 

How different from this is the language of Chris¬ 
tian belief ! It will be enough to cite such passages 
as St. Paul’s: “To me to live is Christ, to die is 
gain,” “For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a 
desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far 
better; ” 1 or, “ I have fought a good fight, I have 
finished my course, I have kept the faith ; henceforth 
there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness 
which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at 
that day, and not to me only, but unto them also that 
love His appearing ;” 2 or, St. John’s: “It doth not 
yet appear what we shall be : but we know that when 
He shall appear we shall be like Him ; for we shall 
see Him as He is .” 3 And the difference is that, 
when the soul is conceived, as it is by the Christian 
Apostles, to be not only sentient and intellectual, 

1 Philippians i. 21-23. 2 2 Timothy iv. 18. 

3 1 John iii. 2. 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


55 

but above all to be spiritual, then alone is it felt to 
be capable of the joy, the rapture, the beatitude of 
communion with the Father of Spirits. 

To this beatitude we shall return in the last 
chapter. For the present we are concerned with the 
nature of Immortality. And in view of Immortality 
(apart of course from Revelation) it would seem 
that the distinction between body and soul, i.e ., 
between the material and the immaterial parts of 
human nature, is fundamental; but it is not so with 
the distinction between what is psychical or of the 
soul, and what is spiritual in human nature. The 
confusion of “soul” and “spirit,” or more properly 
the comprehension of “spirit” under “soul,” is a 
witness to the interlacing of the two concepts. 
“Soul” includes “spirit,” as has been said; it is 
sometimes used for “spirit.” Whether the spirit is 
a principle distinct from the affection and reason, or 
the same principle is on the one side appetitive and 
logical, and on the other side spiritual, is not essen¬ 
tial to the doctrine of Immortality. 

St. Paul’s tripartition of human nature may affect 
the character, but not the fact, of the Immortal Life. 
Apart from the soul, the body is incapable of 
thought and worship. But there is in human 


5 6 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


nature something which is not the body — an entity 
opposed to the body and superior to the body — 
something which is the very life or being of the 
individual; in a word, which is himself. Dr. 
Martineau defines it clearly when he says: “This 
constant centre to which we refer all our acts as 
their source, and all our experiences as their 
receptacle, is what we mean by the soul.” 1 

It remains to ask, then, What is presumably the 
change effected by death ? 

Death is dissolution, but it is the dissolution not 
of mind and spirit, so far as present experience tells, 
but of body and soul; for it is the body alone 
which is left behind at death, the body which dies, 
and all else that constitutes being passes into eternity. 

As is the fate of the affection or the desire in 
death, so is that of the reason, and so, too, that of 
the spirit. Death works the same effect upon all. 
What survives or passes at death out of human 
cognition is the whole immaterial part of human 
nature, or in one word, the soul. 

And herein lies the answer (so far as any can be 
given) to the question, In what does identity consist ? 
Not in the body of a man, it is clear; for the material 

1 A Study of Religion , vol. ii., p. 330. 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


57 


particles constituting the body are for ever under¬ 
going change. It is the persistency of the life, the 
reason, the spirit, that makes the man, and of these 
the seat is the soul; and the soul, if it survive the 
grave (as argument shows), not only constitutes 
identity in this life, but continues and Conserves 
it in the life to come. 

The seat of human identity is the soul. It is the 
man himself who lives after death if the soul is 
immortal. His mental, moral, and spiritual powers 
survive. It is only the vesture of his powers — the 
body — the least and lowest part of him — that dies. 
In his soul is the principle of life. 

There are certain inferences flowing from the 
true conception of the soul’s nature; and they may 
properly be indicated here. 

i. The soul is immortal, i.e., everlasting. 

It does not merely survive death, or a series of 
deaths; it survives everlastingly. It survives in 
virtue of the character which distinguishes it from 
all that is dissoluble and destructible. It possesses 
in itself the potency of an unending existence. It 
partakes of the Immortal Nature, which is centred 
and consummated in God, and, as partaking of that 
Nature, it is gifted with Immortality. 


58 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


2. The soul, as it is immortal, is immaterial. 

This may seem to be a truth which it is needless 
to emphasise. We do not naturally think of the 
soul as in any sense substantial. We can realise, 
or we imagine that we can realise, pure spirit. Yet 
there has been no greater difficulty in human 
thought than the intellectual emancipation of spirit 
from matter. “ The ancients,” says Dr. Dollinger, 
‘‘understood by the soul a kind of secretion or 
evaporation of brain, blood, or heart, or a sort 
of respiration. They described it as a subtle aerial 
or fiery substance, or conceived it to be a mere 
quality, like the harmony of a musical instrument, 
which was lost in the dissolution of the body.” 1 In 
Homer, for example, the soul is imagined as a 
vapour or smoke or similar to these. Thus Achilles 
puts forth his hands to seize the spirit or soul 
of Patroclus, but in vain; for “ the soul had 
sped like a vapour gibbering beneath the earth.” 2 
Similarly in Virgil Eurydice fades from the sight 
of Orpheus, “mingling as the smoke with the thin 
air.” 3 Modern fancy even now clothes the spirit or 
ghost with the form of humanity. Modern supersti- 


1 The Gentile and the Jew , vol. ii., p. 144, Darnell’s Translation. 

2 Iliad, xxiii. 100. 3 Georgies, iv. 499. 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


59 


tion requires the doors or windows of the death- 
chamber to be opened at death, that the spirit may 
depart in peace. 

Not such is the Christian doctrine of Immortality, 
although the fathers of the Church have sometimes 
failed to comprehend it in its integrity, as when 
Tertullian argued that, if the soul were not material, 
it could not act upon the body nor be acted upon 
by it . 1 It is with a finer perception that Dante 
makes the spirits in his Purgatorio tremble at 
finding that his body, unlike their own, casts a 
shadow on the ground. 

“Feriami il Sole in su l’omero destro 
Che gia, raggiando, tutto l’occidente 
Mutava in bianco aspetto di cilestro; 

Ed io facea con l’ombra piii rovente 
Parer la fiamma; e pure a tanto indizio 
Vidi molt 1 ombre, andando, poner mente. 

Questa fu la cagion che diede inizio 
Loro a parlar di me, e cominciarsi 
A dir: — ‘ Colui non par corpo fittizio.’ ” 

“ The sun 

Now all the western clime irradiate chang’d 
From azure tinct to white; and as I pass’d, 

My passing shadow made the umber’d flame 
Burn ruddier. At so strange a sight I mark’d 


1 De Anima, chap. v. 



6o 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


That many a spirit mar veil’d on his way. 

This bred occasion first to speak of me, 

‘ He seems,’ said they, ‘ no insubstantial frame.’ ” 1 

3. Another point which emerges clearly upon 
consideration is that the Immortality of the lower 
animals (if it exists) must be something essentially 
different from human Immortality. What are the 

arguments for Immortality, and how far, if they 

hold good for men, they will hold good also for 

the lower animals, is a question which will be 

considered in its place. All that need be said here 
is that the nature of Immortality must depend upon 
the nature of the soul. Now the lower animals 
consist of a material element, viz., the body which 
remains at death, like the human body, and decays, 
and also of certain immaterial elements or principles, 
viz., the life, the sense, the appetite and (under 
certain limitations) the reason, but not of spirit. 
The Immortality then of the lower animals, if they 
are endowed with it at all, may well be such as 
allows of life, movement, desire and instinctive 
action ; but it cannot be more than this, unless in 
virtue of some special Divine operation, such as the 
original creation of life upon the earth, or the birth 

1 Purgatorio, Canto xxvi., Cary’s Translation. The same thought 
occurs in Cantos v. and xxv. 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 6 l 

of the individual soul within the embryo; it can¬ 
not be in itself a life of the spirit, and therefore 
it cannot admit of the spiritual prerogatives of 
worship or rapture or communion with God. 

4. There is another inference not less important, 
which results from the true conception of human 
nature as a whole. We are too apt to suppose 
that the only part of human nature which sur¬ 
vives the grave is the spirit, though we speak 
of it as the “soul.” We have pictured to our¬ 
selves the Immortal Life as circumscribed by 
the duties and prerogatives of devotion; we have 
not thought of it as affording any scope for the 
play of intellect or passion. But the soul has 
been shown to be intellectual and moral as well as 
spiritual; it must therefore be capable of intellectual 
and moral activities. It is not only the disposition 
to virtue, it is equally the disposition to learning and 
affection, which transcends death. Whatever seed 
of knowledge or dutifulness or industry or virtue is 
sown in this life will bear fruit in Immortality. 

This is the solemnising, inspiring lesson of human 
life. Life is not rightly conceived as terminating in 
the grave. Death interrupts not the continuity of 
existence. The faculties of human nature, so far as 


62 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


they are immaterial, are projected at death into a 
new and ample sphere. We shall enter that sphere 
with the attainments and graces of this life, only with¬ 
out the limitations to which this life is necessarily 
subject. We shall reap as we have sown. “ That 
which makes the question concerning a future life 
to be of so great importance to us,” says Bishop 
Butler, “is our capacity of happiness and misery. 
And that which makes the consideration of it to 
be of so great importance to us, is the supposition 
of our happiness and misery hereafter depending 
upon our actions here.” 1 

Let me sum up the conclusions of this chapter. 

We have seen that Immortality as a doctrine has 
not always and everywhere borne the same meaning. 

It cannot be rightly understood except by a 
study of human nature in its elements or parts. 

Human nature consists not of body and the 
bodily powers alone, but of the vital principle, 
the desire, the affection, the reason and the spirit. 

All that is not body, when set against the body, 
is the soul. 

The distinction between soul and body is im¬ 
portant as affecting the fact of Immortality. 


Analogy , part i., chap, ii., p. 33. 


NATURE OF THE BELIEF 


63 


The distinction between the spirit and the other 
parts of the soul is important as affecting the 
nature of Immortality. 

The soul which lives after death is not only 
spiritual, but emotional and rational. It is the 
whole immaterial part of Man. It survives and 
survives eternally in the fulness of its intellectual, 
moral and spiritual powers. 

And its fate in the future life is in some manner— 
which will be presently investigated — fixed or con¬ 
ditioned by its character and discipline in this life. 


CHAPTER II 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 

The prevalent doctrine of Immortality has been 
largely determined by the Hebrew and Christian 
Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. But it 
is a belief which reaches beyond and behind those 
Scriptures. It is one of those world-thoughts (if 
they may be so called) which are not of one place 
or time, but of all places and all times, and may be 
said to be the common heritage of mankind. 

“Ut deos esse natura opinamur,” says Cicero, 
“qualesque sint ratione cognoscimus, sic permanere 
animos arbitramur consensu omnium nationum.” 1 

Modern research has been largely successful in 
tracing the phenomena of human life and thought 

1 " As it is by nature that we believe in the being of the Gods and 
by reason that we apprehend their nature, so it is by the unanimous 
opinion of all nations that we hold the doctrine of the permanent 
existence of the soul.”— Tusc. Disp. i. 16, 36. 

64 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


65 


back to their origin. It has laid bare the beginnings 
of things. The sciences of Anatomy and Embryol¬ 
ogy have demonstrated the close connexion between 
the human and even the lowest animal forms. Com¬ 
parative Philology has revealed, by the intimate study 
of language, national and social relations which were 
scarcely imagined a century ago; it has followed the 
many diverging currents of human speech to their 
source. Comparative Mythology has shown the 
evolution of refined and disciplined beliefs from a 
few crude and simple apprehensions. Sociology has 
discovered the germs of modern institutions in the 
usages of primitive society. Everywhere it is the 
sense of history — the sense of development — which 
is men’s guide in judging the present by the past. 

But while primitive ideas, beliefs and usages have 
been thus brought prominently into light, the actual 
speculative value which belongs to them has been 
often forgotten or misunderstood. Some time ago 
their importance was minimised; it is now apt to be 
exaggerated. For instance, the Darwinian theory, 
establishing the descent of man, or the possibility of 
his descent, from a lower form of animal life, has 
been taken in a sense to fetter his capacity for the 
development of spiritual powers. But nothing in 


66 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


the past of man can cripple his present or his future. 
Man is what he is, and he will be what he will be; 
he is not, nor will he be, merely what he was. 
However lowly his origin may have been, even if 
he were made, as the Scripture tells, of the dust of 
the ground, there can be no limitation of his possible 
greatness. In the Divine view the end is prior to 
the beginning. The early beliefs which human 
history exhibits are not complete or absolute; they 
are promises of better things; they are the germs 
out of which new and great beliefs will some day 
grow; they are the steps of the ladder by which man 
climbs to his splendid destiny, and the ladder, though 
it is set up on earth, ascends to Heaven. 

The belief in God is itself an instance of this law. 
History does not exhibit this belief as fully realised 
in the dawn of human society; it has been doubted 
if the belief exists then at all. Monotheism is not 
the basis of religious thought, but its climax. In 
the history of belief man ascends from many gods 
to one God, or, indeed, from many powers, physical 
and animate, but not Divine, to Polytheism, and so 
to the worship of the one true God. Beyond that 
worship, beyond that belief, it is impossible to rise. 
It is felt to be true because it is final. To it all 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 67 

prior beliefs and speculations tend. From it issue 
the consequent beliefs which sanctify life. There is 
a slow but sure consolidation of belief regarding 
the Divine Nature, and it assumes the permanent 
form of a belief in the one God. 

It is so too with the doctrine of the human soul. 
The belief in the soul — in its reality, its continuous 
existence, its supreme value — is not an initial but a 
final belief of Humanity. It is the highest article of 
the highest Faith. No more than the germ — the 
primordial spring — of this great belief is discernible 
in the early movements of the human intellect and 
conscience. But it is beliefs which are germinal 
that elevate human nature; the revelations of God 
are never complete, they are gradual and progressive, 
and it is “at sundry times and in divers manners,” 
i.e ., in many parts and in many modes, that He 
unfolds the truths which men most need to know. 

To argue that the truth of Divine things is more 
likely to reside in the feelings and imaginations of 
savage races than in the sustained and reasoned 
convictions of civilised society is to read history 
backwards; it is to argue that infancy is wiser than 
maturity, and that the child knows more of his 
Maker than the full-grown man. Belief, like civi- 


68 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


lisation, is a development, it advances by steps; 
and every step is won slowly and even painfully, 
but the last stage is truer than the first. All that 
may be justly said of human nature is that the first 
faint germ of belief, no less than its full flower, is a 
witness to the native intuitions of the heart. 

It is not true that Man believes, always and every¬ 
where, in the one God. But it is true that everywhere, 
when man attains to a certain stage of intellectual 
and moral progress, he developes or tends to develope 
a belief in one God. That belief is the crown of all 
preceding beliefs. They point or converge towards 
it. And beyond it they cannot reach. Monotheism 
is, as it were, the resting-place of the human soul 
after many questionings and many strivings through 
long ages. 

Similarly it is not true that Man at all stages of 
his history has logically realised or expressed the 
doctrine of the soul, although it has lain, as a seed, 
within his conscience. But it is true that Man, as 
he advances in thought and culture, becomes more 
and more inspired with a conviction of the soul’s 
proper being and character and destiny. The higher 
his civilisation, the greater is the value which he 
sets upon the soul, whether in itself or in its relation 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


6 9 


to the body. And the teaching of Jesus Christ in 
regard to the soul is as far in advance of all other 
religious teachings as is His morality of other morali¬ 
ties or His Person of the persons of all who in 
human history have been the founders and ex¬ 
ponents of other religions than the Christian. 

Thus it appears that the belief in the existence 
and dignity of the soul is as it were the focus in 
which other beliefs, simpler -and more primitive, are 
found to unite. 

The object of this chapter is to trace the progress 
of religious thought respecting the soul until it 
reaches its climax in the Gospel of Christ. Such a 
survey of beliefs can be but imperfect; but it may 
perhaps not be inadequate to its purpose. 

The primitive beliefs of men assume or tend to 
assume the form which by Dr. Tylor and others 
after him has been termed Animism. 

Animism is the sense of universal personality. It 
was natural that man should realise in himself the 
fact of personality. It was not less natural that he 
should ascribe to all animate beings, and in a 
measure even to inanimate things, the personality of 
which he was conscious in himself. And it was 
natural, or not unnatural, that he should distinguish 


7 ° 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


the personality so completely from the matter or 
vesture in which it was contained as to imagine 
that the two could be divorced without any neces¬ 
sary destruction or injury of the person. 

Animism, then, is the first philosophical, as well 
as the first religious, theory of life. 

From it arose the impersonation of natural objects. 
Man saw not fountains only, but the goddesses of 
fountains, or Naiads; not woods only, but the 
nymphs of the woods, or Dryads. He lived in an 
invisible fairy-land; nay, he could often persuade 
himself that he beheld in valley or forest, or on the 
green grass of the moorland, the evident traces of 
the fairy-forms in which he believed. The world 
seemed richer then and brighter to all men than it 
has seemed since; but of all men it seemed richest 
and brightest to the Greeks. 

Hence arose, too, in human minds the belief in 
the ghosts or spirits of the dead, a belief to which 
the consciousness of dreams may well have given 
probability and effect. And although the belief in 
human spirits as manifesting themselves after death 
has been much discredited by folly and imposture, 
yet from its strength and universality it deserves 
respect as attesting a powerful intuitive conviction 
of Humanity. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


71 

And hence arose in human minds the conscious¬ 
ness of something more precious, because more 
permanent, than the body, a reality underlying the 
phenomena of personal experience, and of that 
something as being essentially the man. 

From the primary intuitions or imaginations of 
Animism to the Christian conception and cultivation 
of the soul, as transcendently superior to the body, 
the process of thought is simple, constant and 
inevitable. The great belief once sown in the field 
of human conscience springs up and bears its 
natural fruit. 

But this belief, as has been said, is independent of 
Christianity or any supposed Divine Revelation. It 
is found not only among such peoples as have con¬ 
sidered themselves to be in one sense or other the 
favourites of Heaven, but among peoples who did 
not understand it and could give no account of it, but 
regarded it as a natural self-evident truth. Neither 
Judaism nor Christianity originated it; they did but 
accept it as pre-existent and modify or expand it. 

Literature is in its nature no sufficient witness to 
the beliefs of an uncivilised and unlettered society. 
Yet as soon as human thought began to express 
itself in writing, one of its most frequent expressions 


7 2 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


was the belief in the soul’s Immortality. A few 
passages chosen for their typical significance will 
illustrate the widespread character of the belief. 

Upon its existence among primitive races it will 
be sufficient to quote the statements made, as the 
results of prolonged inquiry, by authorities so dis¬ 
tinguished as M. Renouf and Dr. Tylor. Of these 
the former says : — “ A belief in the persistence of 
life after death, and the observation of religions 
practices founded upon the belief, may be dis¬ 
covered in every part of the world, in every age, 
and among men representing every degree and 
variety of culture .” 1 

The latter: — “ Looking at the religion of the 
lower races as a whole, we shall at least not be ill- 
advised in taking as one of its general and principal 
elements the doctrine of the soul’s future life .” 2 

Mr. Alger, then, is not wrong in his conclusion, 
“The belief of mankind that a soul or ghost survives 
the body has been so nearly universal as to appear 
like the spontaneous result of an instinct.” 3 

Literature from its birth attests the belief in the 
survival of the soul after death, or its Immortality. 

1 Hibbert Lectures , p. 124. 2 Primitive Culture , vol. ii., p. 21. 

3 A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life y p. 583. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


73 


Thus Bunsen, following Professor Max Muller, 
quotes, as from the Vedas, such passages as these: 

1. An address to the spirit of the dead, when the 
funeral pile is lighted : 

“ Depart, depart, along these ancient paths, 

By which our fathers have gone home to rest; 

The God Varuna shalt thou now behold, 

And Yama, the two kings who take our gifts. 

Go to the fathers, sojourn there with Yama 
In highest heaven, fit meed of thy deserts, 

Leave there all evil, then go home once more, 

And take a form of radiant glory bright. . . . 

There where the pious dwell, and roam in peace, 

Shall God S&vitri bear thee to their ranks.” 1 

2. An appeal to Soma in the hymn of Kasyapa: 

“To the world where unfading Light, where Sunshine itself hath 
its home, 

Thither bring me, O Soma, where no harm and no death ever 
come; 

Where Yama as sovereign rules, where the innermost heaven 
exists, 

Where the great waters repose, oh, there let me dwell an 
immortal! 

In the heavenly vaults where man lives and moves at his 
pleasure, 

Where are the mansions of light, oh, there let me dwell an 
immortal! 

Where wishes and longing abide, where the sun ever beams in 
his glory, 

Where bliss that can satisfy dwells, oh, there let me dwell, an 
immortal! 


1 God in History , vol. i., p. 310, Winkworth’s Translation. 



THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


74 

Where gladness and joy may be found, where pleasure and 
rapture prevail, 

Where every wish is fulfilled, oh, there let me dwell an 
immortal! 111 

But even more striking is the noble passage of 
the Bhagavadgita where the Deity is represented as 
saying of men slain in battle: 

“You have grieved for those who deserve no 
grief, and you talk words of wisdom. Learned men 
grieve not for the living nor the dead. Never did I 
not exist, nor you, nor these rulers of men ; nor will 
any one of us ever hereafter cease to be. . . . These 
bodies appertaining to the embodied (self) which is 
eternal, indestructible, and indefinable, are said to be 
perishable; therefore do engage in battle, O descend¬ 
ant of Bharata! He who thinks it to be the killer 
and he who thinks it to be the killed, both know 
nothing. It kills not, is not killed. It is not born, 
nor does it ever die, nor, having existed, does it 
exist no more. Unborn, everlasting, unchangeable, 
and primeval, it is not killed when the body is killed. 
O son of Pritha! how can that man who knows it 
thus to be indestructible, everlasting, unborn and 
inexhaustible, how and whom can he kill, whom can 
he cause to be killed ? As a man, casting off old 

1 God in History, vol. i., p. 314. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


75 

clothes, puts on others and new ones, so the em¬ 
bodied (self) casting off old bodies, goes to others 
and new ones. Weapons do not divide it (into 
pieces) ; fire does not burn it; waters do not 
moisten it; the wind does not dry it up. It is not 
divisible; it is not combustible; it is not to be 
moistened; it is not to be dried up. It is everlasting, 
all-pervading, staple, firm and eternal.” 1 

But a passage of still more venerable antiquity 
occurs in the Katha-Upanishad, which is an allegory 
of a sage who descended into the invisible world to 
wrest the secret of existence from Death: 

“ Beyond the senses is the mind, beyond the mind 
is the highest (created) Being, higher than that 
Being is the Great Self, higher than the Great, the 
highest Undeveloped. 

“ Beyond the Undeveloped is the Person, the 
all-pervading and entirely imperceptible. Every 
creature that knows him is liberated, and obtains 
Immortality. 

“ His form is not to be seen, no one beholds him 
with the eye. He is imagined by the heart, by wisdom, 
by the mind. Those who know this, are immortal. 

“When the five instruments of knowledge stand 

1 Sacred Books of the East , vol. viii., pp. 43, 44. 


76 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


still together with the mind, and when the intellect 
does not move, that is called the highest state. 

“This, the firm holding back of the senses, is 
what is called Yoga. He must be free from thought¬ 
lessness then, for Yoga comes and goes. 

“He (the Self) cannot be reached by speech, by 
mind, or by the eye. How can it be apprehended 
except by him who says : ‘ He is ’ ? 

“By the words ‘ He is,’ is he to be apprehended, 
and by (admitting) the reality of both (the invisible 
Brahman and the visible world, as coming from 
Brahman). When he has been apprehended by the 
words ‘He is,’ then his reality reveals itself. 

“When all desires that dwell in his heart cease, 
then the mortal becomes immortal, and obtains 
Brahman. 

“ When all the ties of the heart are severed here 
on earth, then the mortal becomes immortal — here 
ends the teaching.” 1 

It is not my purpose, nor am I competent, to 
examine the theology of the Vedic hymns, ranging 
as they do perhaps over a period of a thousand 
years; I am only concerned to show that they con- 

1 Sacred Books of the East , vol. xv., pp. 22, 23. I owe this reference 
to the kindness of Professor Cowell. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


77 


tain and express the hope of personal existence after 
death, of Immortality. 

The same hope asserts itself, though with nume¬ 
rous variations, in the religious systems (so far as 
they are ascertainable) of the Accadians, and after 
them of the Babylonians and Assyrians, of the 
Persians, of the Egyptians, whose influence upon 
Jewish thought will be presently considered, and of 
the Greeks. In them all it is interesting to observe 
how the idea of the future life was gradually purified, 
gradually spiritualised. Of the Babylonians, for 
instance, Professor Sayce says that their Hades 
“ closely resembles the Hades of the Homeric 
poems;” it is “a land of forgetfulness and of 
darkness, where the good and evil deeds of this 
life are remembered no more.” But he adds: “Side 
by side with this pitiful picture of the world beyond 
the grave, there were the beginnings of higher and 
nobler ideas. . . . Little by little, as the conception 
of the gods and their dwelling-place became spiri¬ 
tualised, the conception of the future condition of 
mankind became spiritualised also. The condition 
of the Immortality of the conscious soul began to 
dawn upon the Babylonian mind, and along with 
it necessarily went the doctrine of rewards and 


78 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


punishments for the actions committed in the 
flesh.” 1 

For the teaching of the Zend-Avesta in its highest 
form it is enough to refer to the striking passage in 
which itjs told how the soul of the righteous and 
the soul of the wicked quit the body at death, and 
each of them after three days meets its own con¬ 
science, the one as a beauteous maid, the other as a 
foul old woman, and the one passes through the 
three paradises of Good-Thought, Good-Word and 
Good-Deed to the celestial bliss, and the other 
through the three hells of Evil-Thought, Evil- 
Word and Evil-Deed to the infernal misery. 2 

And these quotations, so significant of a hope in 
things unseen, may end with some lines of the most 
religious of the Greek poets, the poet Pindar. For 
he too had caught a vision of reward and penalty 
waiting upon the deeds of earth, and he sang how 
“the guilty souls no sooner die than they pay the 
penalty of their sin, and one there is who judgeth 
beneath the earth the evil deeds wrought within the 
realm of Zeus and doth pronounce sentence under a 
compulsion that he loathes; but the good dwell for 

1 Hibbert Lectures , v., pp. 364, 365. 

2 Sacred Books of the East , vol. xxiii., pp. 314 sqq. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


79 


ever in the light of the sun, alike by day and by 
night, and are the inheritors of an unlaborious life, 
they vex not the earth with strength of arm nor the 
waters of the sea all through their days, but as many 
as were gladly true to their plighted word pass a 
tearless time among the honoured of the gods; the 
others endure trouble too piteous to look upon.” 1 

For enough has now been said to demonstrate the 
reality and universality of the hope of a life tran¬ 
scending the grave. 

It is well known that to this rising and spreading 
tide of belief in a life of the soul, distinct from the 
physical life and transcending and surviving it, there 
is one remarkable exception. Just where the belief 
might have been expected to be strongest, it fails. 
The early books of the Old Testament afford, it is 
said, no traces of a belief in the soul’s Immortality. 

The strangeness of this fact demands considera¬ 
tion. 

The Jews, as a people, were inspired with a 
strong and vital feeling for religion. The constant 
assertion of that feeling was the great service which 
Judaism rendered to Humanity. The Jews had 
always many faults ; they were narrow, isolated, and 
1 Olympian Odes , ii. 57 sqq. 


8o 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


self-centred; they were deficient in many of the 
powers and graces of their neighbours; they were 
not distinguished in arms or in arts; they were 
unpopular, and the secular world looked down upon 
them as a prey; yet their religious literature has 
occupied, and occupies still, an unrivalled place in 
the affections and interests of mankind. They 
possessed what may be called a genius for religion. 
They were in the realm of faith supreme authorities, 
as in the realm of art were the Greeks, and in the 
realm of politics the Romans. No disappointment, 
no disaster, could injure the supremacy of the 
religious sentiment among the Jews. It centred 
all through their history in that Messianic hope 
which has been the great centripetal force of 
Judaism in all ages and among all nations of the 
world. Yet it is in this people, the most religious 
people among men, that the hope of the Immortal 
Life —• the hope most deeply characteristic of religion 
—.was for many centuries practically non-existent. 
How is it possible to account for this fact ? 

It is perhaps hardly necessary at this present day 
to consider in detail the paradoxical explanation of 
Bishop Warburton. His argument, advanced with 
much dialectical ingenuity and with a vast display 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


81 


of learning in the Divine Legation of Moses, is briefly 
this: that a religion invented by Man could not have 
failed to assume a life beyond the grave as one of its 
cardinal tenets, that the Mosaic Law makes no such 
assumption, that it could not therefore be the 
invention of Man, and that, not being the inven¬ 
tion of Man, it must have been the revelation of 
God. 

To quote his own words : “ If religion be necessary 
to civil Government, and if religion cannot subsist 
under the common dispensation of Providence 
without a future state of rewards or punishments, 
so consummate a lawgiver (as Moses) would never 
have neglected to inculcate the belief of such a state, 
had he not been well assured that an extraordinary 
Providence was indeed to be administered over his 
people : or were it possible he had been so infatu¬ 
ated, the impotency of a religion wanting a future 
state must very soon have concluded in the 
destruction of his Republic. Yet nevertheless it 
flourished and continued sovereign for many ages. 
These two proofs of the proposition (that an extra¬ 
ordinary Providence was really administered) drawn 
from the thing omitted and the person omitting, 
may be reduced to the following syllogisms : 


82 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


“ i. Whatsoever religion and society have no future 
state for their support, must be supported by 
an extraordinary Providence. 

“The Jewish religion and society had no future 
state for their support. 

“Therefore the Jewish religion and society were 
supported by an extraordinary Providence. 

“ And again: 

“ 2. The ancient lawgivers universally believed that 
a religion without a future state could be sup¬ 
ported only by an extraordinary Providence. 

“ Moses, an ancient lawgiver, learned in all the 
wisdom of the Egyptians (the principal part 
of which wisdom was inculcating the doctrine 
of a future life), instituted such a religion. 

“ Therefore Moses believed that his religion 
was supported by an extraordinary Provid¬ 
ence.” 1 

The argument is a paradox, and little more ; still 
it rests upon a singular phenomenon. In all, or 
nearly all, religious literature, except the Mosaic, the 
belief in God and the belief in the soul’s Immortality, 
however erroneously held, are inextricably blended 

1 The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated ’ book vi., section vi., 
vol. iii., p. 241. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 83 

together. In the Mosaic law the belief in God is 
strongest, the belief in Immortality is weakest. 
This is a fact that needs to be explained. 

It appears to me that whatever explanation is 
offered must take account of the special character 
attaching to the early books of the Old Testament. 
In primitive society, not among the Jews only, but 
everywhere, the individual is of slight importance; it 
is the race — the tribe — the family which is every¬ 
thing. The individual can hardly be said to enjoy 
a personal existence, or at least a personal moral 
existence, in himself. It is not the individual who 
holds property. It is not the individual who con¬ 
ducts business. It is not the individual who sins or 
who is punished for sinning. “ The moral elevation 
and moral debasement of the individual appear to 
be confounded with, or postponed to, the merits 
and offences of the group to which the individual 
belongs. If the community sins, its guilt is much 
more than the sum of the offences committed by its 
members; the crime is a corporate act, and extends 
in its consequences to many more persons than 
have shared in its actual perpetration. If, on the 
other hand, the individual is conspicuously guilty, it 
is his children, his kinsfolk, his tribesmen, or his 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


84 

fellow-citizens who suffer with him, and sometimes 
for him.” 1 

Society, in fact, begins with collectivism, in what¬ 
ever sense or degree the collectivism may be under¬ 
stood ; it does not begin with individualism. The 
individual is regarded as a member of a body; he is 
not regarded in himself. 

The second commandment of the Decalogue is a 
witness to the Jewish sense of corporate or collective 
responsibility for the actions of the individual. It is 
strange that Christians should so often hear and 
read that commandment without appreciating either 
its close affinity to the teachings of modern science 
upon heredity, or its wide departure from the code 
of current Christian morals. But it is enough to 
say now that the moral consequences of actions are 
represented in it as collective and not as individual. 
“I the Lord thy God visit the sins of the fathers 
upon the children unto the third and fourth gene¬ 
ration of them that hate Me, and show mercy unto 
thousands of them that love Me and keep My com¬ 
mandments.” Such moral teaching is accepted as 
natural throughout the Pentateuchal literature. 
It marks a stage in the history of human thought — 

1 Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law , chap, v., p. 127. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


85 

a stage where the individual is worth little, and 
the body of which he is a member is supreme. 
Collectivism then, and not individualism, is the 
keynote of the moral teaching in the Pentateuch. 

But if the individual counted for little in this life, 
it was not to be expected that he would count for 
more in the next. Personality, thrown into the 
shade, as it was, in this world could not well be 
projected into another world. Therefore it was that 
the same difficulty which in pagan nations and 
among pagan thinkers of acute and enlightened 
intellectuality, as among the Greeks, obscured the 
doctrine of an absolute Immortal Life — the difficulty 
of conceiving personality — told among the Jews 
against the belief that the soul of each individual 
would survive in simple personal existence after death. 

There is another thought which throws light upon 
the attitude of the early Hebrew Scriptures towards 
Immortality. What is the great conception which 
these Scriptures keep in view ? It is not the privi¬ 
lege or destiny of the individual, it is the institution 
of a Divine society upon earth. The Messianic idea, 
as has been said, pervades the Old Testament; but 
the idea of the Messiah was not originally, or princi¬ 
pally, that he would be the Saviour of individual 


86 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


souls, it was rather that he would be the Founder of 
a Kingdom. The Gospels in the New Testament 
show clearly enough that the contemporaries of our 
Lord’s life not only conceived of the Messianic 
Kingdom as a deliverance from thraldom, or in 
other words as the creation of a new secular Theo¬ 
cracy, but were impatient and intolerant of any 
other conception than this. But it was the object 
of the Mosaic law to foster and cultivate the idea of 
a Divine Kingdom on earth. For this the ritual of 
Judaism was a preparation ; of this it was a type and 
an exponent. 

“The conception of a perfect kingdom,” says 
Dorner, 1 “overpowers that of personality.” The 
Old Testament is the history of an elect people, but 
not of elect persons. Thus it is that in the Scrip¬ 
tures of the Old Testament the fate of the individual, 
whether it be present or future, does not come fre¬ 
quently or directly into question. It matters little 
what happens to the individual, so that the Divine 
Kingdom is set up in the world. Apart from the 
spiritual or religious aspect of life, the case of Greek 
thought is not dissimilar to that of Hebrew. In the 

1 System of Christian Doctrine , vol. ii., p. 85, in Clark’s Foreign 
Theological Library. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


87 


writings of Plato and Aristotle as much as in the 
law of Moses the individual is merged in the 
society of which he is a member. The duty of the 
State to the individual is scarcely considered. That 
the State exists for the good of the citizens who 
compose it, if it be a truism in the modern world, 
would in the ancient have seemed a paradox. But 
the duty of the individual to the State is paramount. 
It is the State which invests his life with meaning 
and dignity; to the State, therefore, he owes not his 
life only but, if the demand is made of him, all that 
constitutes life a boon. Thus Ethics is itself, as 
Aristotle says, a branch of Politics. There is no 
morality but such as is relative to the needs and 
capacities of the State. It would not have occurred 
to the ancient Greek philosopher to inquire if the 
individual life withered or flourished, so long as the 
State was secure. Nor did it occur to the ancient 
Hebrew legislator to discuss the fate of the indi¬ 
vidual either in this life or in the next, when his 
heart was bent upon establishing and ennobling the 
Divine Kingdom in the world of men. 

If this is a just interpretation of the Mosaic law, 
it follows that the absence of the soul’s Immortality, 
as a doctrine regulating man’s conception of the 


88 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


universe and of his own relation to the present and 
the future, is not an evidence, any more than it is a 
disproof, of Divine inspiration ; it is the natural out¬ 
come of circumstances. That the circumstances 
were special and transitory may be admitted ; but 
they could not have been other than they were. 
Spiritual individualism, although foreshadowed in 
several passages of prophetical and still more of 
apocryphal literature, is the revelation of Jesus Christ. 

The Jews learnt much about the soul in the 
course of centuries; but they did not learn the two 
great truths, that all human souls are of equal value 
and that the value of each soul is supreme. 

Again, it is necessary to remember that the Mosaic 
law was in some sense an inevitable reaction against 
the creed and ritual of Egypt. When “ Israel came 
out of Egypt,” they came with deeply imprinted 
memories of oppression. Except, indeed, in certain 
few rebellious hours, of which the Pentateuch speaks 
with a solemnity approximating to horror, they cast 
the beliefs and symbols of the Egyptian religious 
system behind their backs. It was because the 
episode of the Golden Calf was a return to the life 
which symbolised for the Jews a state of spiritual 
darkness that it awoke sentiments of indignation 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


89 


and severity in the heart of Moses. For the deliver¬ 
ance from Egypt was a type of the soul’s deliverance 
from ignominy and sin. 

What, then, was the striking feature of Egyptian 
life? It was religion. But not only so, — it was a 
religion in which the present was enveloped in the 
future and life was overshadowed by death. A 
living writer says : “ The Egyptian lived among 
tombs whose size and splendour reduced into 
insignificance the dwellings of the living, and the 
most characteristic features of his mythology were 
representations of the death and resurrection of 
nature in winter and summer, as types representing 
the death and resurrection of man .” 1 

The story of ancient Egypt is a warning of the 
paralysis that may creep over the beneficent activities 
of the religious spirit, when it is used to divert men’s 
thoughts from the things of sight to the unseen 
world. For religion is the aspiration of the human 
soul to God; but it ceases to be true religion, if it 
loses the sense either of Heaven or of earth. The 
Egyptians of old dwelt in their minds and con¬ 
sciences upon the life beyond the grave; their 
reflective habit solemnised and elevated their lives, 

1 Caird, Evolution of Religion , vol. i., p. 32. 


9 ° 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


but it sterilised them. The shadow of futurity 
rested, as a cloud, upon the present. They thought 
not how to live, but how to survive death. The 
striking edifices of Egypt were tombs, and to-day 
the ancient homes of the living have long since 
mouldered in decay, but the tombs and the sepul¬ 
chral monuments remain. The pyramids of Ghizeh 
and Sakhara are undying witnesses to death. 

The effect of Egypt as it now is upon the mind 
of a traveller who visits it from the West is 
probably less uniform and therefore less impressive 
than it was in antiquity. To-day a stir of life pulses 
through the veins and arteries of that mysterious 
country. Egypt is felt to have a future as well as a 
past. But during the centuries of Egyptian history 
to which the pyramids afford an immortal attest¬ 
ation, the sense of a never-ceasing, never-ending 
struggle against the power of death — a struggle 
carried on with the accumulated resources of human 
labour, human skill and human devotion — must 
have seemed, as indeed it was, supreme. 

It was upon death and upon the fate of the soul 
after death that the thoughts of the Egyptian priests 
and people brooded perpetually. They evolved a 
positive complete theory of the future life. The 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


91 


Book of the Dead is at once an eschatology and a 
ritual of the dead. And here it may be permitted 
me to quote the words of Professor Salmond: 
“The idea of a future judgment for all men was 
a cardinal point in the Egyptian conception of a 
future life. This made it a distinctly moral con¬ 
ception. The soul, which seems to have been 
thought of as coming from the gods, had a retri¬ 
butive future before it. It was for Osiris or for 
Set 1 on earth, and its deeds here decided its future. 
Osiris was the judge. Everything turned upon his 
judgment. The justified one was identified with 
him, received his name, enjoyed his protection and 
guidance, and became himself an Osiris. When 
the dead man reaches the Hall of the Double 
Truth, he is before the throne of this Divine judge. 
The goddess Maat, the goddess of Justice, Truth, or 
Law, is there, holding a sceptre and the symbol of 
life. The scales are set; the man’s heart in the one, 
the image of Maat in the other. Horus watches 
the index. Thoth or Tehati, the god of letters, 
takes the record. The standard of judgment is 
high. It covers all the great requirements of truth, 

1 Set was, in the Egyptian mythology, the principle of evil, as 
Osiris was of good. 


9 2 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


purity, righteousness, charity, piety. Above the 
balance are the forty-two assessors, whose office is 
with the forty-two great forms of sin. The 
departed makes his confession. It takes the form 
of a negative statement, denying his guilt in respect 
of these sins. His conscience, or moral nature, 
symbolised by the heart in the scale, speaks for 
him. If the judgment is favourable, he regains the 
use of hands, limbs and mind; he receives back 
what he had lost by death. His soul, his Ka, his 
shadow are restored, and he begins a new life. If 
the judgment is unfavourable, he bears the penalty 
of loss and pain.” 1 

Much more is there in the Book of the Dead 
respecting the discipline of the justified soul for its 
full and final blessing; but it lies beyond the scope 
of this essay. For I am seeking to delineate, how¬ 
ever briefly, the general progress of the belief in the 
invisible future life; I am not writing a history of 
Egyptian beliefs. 

But the special Egyptian belief concerning the 
dead is emphasised in the many poetic symbols and 
images with which the life of ancient Egypt was 
replete. The serpent, the scarabaeus, the butterfly, 

1 The Christian Doctrine of Immortality , chap, iv., p. 59. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


93 


are all suggestive of the soul’s emancipation from 
the prison of the body into a new Immortal Life. 
And everywhere the death and resurrection of 
nature — the death in winter, the resurrection in the 
springtide — typified as they are by the loss and the 
finding of Osiris, appear as emblems of Man’s death, 
and of his resurrection after death into Immortality. 

Thus the Jews had in Egypt been the witnesses 
of a religious system in which the creed and ritual 
of a dominant hierarchy pervaded and regulated 
human life. The Egyptians passed their days 
under the shadow of religion, and their present 
was insensibly darkened by the thought of the 
unknown and awful future. 

It may well be believed, then, that the great 
Legislator under whose guidance the Exodus of the 
Jewish people from Egypt took place, desired in 
the interest of true religion to break with the 
religious beliefs and practices of Egyptian society. 
The breach so made by the Mosaic law was 
complete and irreparable. If the Egyptians wor¬ 
shipped many gods, the Israelites were to “have 
none other God” than Jehovah. If the Egyptians 
employed innumerable forms and idols as sym¬ 
bolising the various aspects of the Divine Nature, 


94 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


the Israelites were cautioned against “ making any 
graven image.” If the Egyptians sought to immor¬ 
talise their mighty dead by monuments that should 
endure as long as time, the leaders and reformers 
of Hebrew society were “gathered to their fathers” 
without any pageant of religious ceremonial. And 
if the Egyptians brooded over the fate of the dead, 
if they diversified it with an elaboration of picto¬ 
rial' art and fancy and invested it with the solemn 
mystery of judgment, the Israelites must find their 
hopes and gratifications and the practical sanctions of 
their morality within the confines of the present life. 

It was not irreligion then, but the strength of the 
religious feeling, that confined the beliefs and specu¬ 
lations of the Jewish people after the Exodus to the 
present life. The theology of the Pentateuch is a 
reaction against the superstition of the Egyptian 
hierarchy. It would seem to me that the Mosaic 
secularism (if it may be called so), i.e., the limitation 
of the religious view to the present life, is in some 
senses a parallel to the Buddhist doctrine of 
Nirvana; for obscure as that doctrine is and 
various as are the interpretations which have been 
given of it, it may, I think, be most reasonably 
regarded as a reaction against the composite imagina- 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


95 


tions which had gathered in the successive phases 
of Brahminical religion around the life of Man 
beyond the grave. In the one case the human 
mind found a refuge in the disregard of the future 
spiritual existence, and in the other it found a 
refuge in the conception of a future existence calm, 
passionless and all but dead. 

But whether this be so or not, it is safe to assert 
that the Jews, being under the Mosaic law, put 
aside to a large extent the thought of the future, 
because they were unwilling that the future, with 
its sombre gloom, should overshadow the practical 
immediate duties of the present. Their present¬ 
worldliness (so to speak of it), was a protest against 
the Egyptian other-worldliness. It was a protest 
not only of logical necessity, but of definite moral 
elevation. 

The theology of the Pentateuch may be said to 
embody the first stage in the beliefs of the Jewish 
nation touching Immortality. The soul’s Immor¬ 
tality was not declared, it was not denied; it was 
simply left out of sight. 

Yet the Jews, like other nations, could not rest 
content with a mere indifference to the future life 
of the soul. They could not avoid the question, Is 


9 6 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

death the end of the soul’s life ? Does the soul 
indeed perish with the body ? 

The answer supplied by Jewish thought is the 
doctrine of Sheol . 1 It is the second stage in the 
belief of Immortality. 

The word “ Sheol ” is the Hebrew equivalent of 
the Greek “Hades” and the Egyptian “Amenti.” 
It is said to mean “the hollow place” ; and, if so, it 
is exactly represented by the English word “hell,” 
when used, as in the Creed, to denote the unseen 
world of spirits, and not, as too often in common 
phraseology, the place in which spirits are believed 
to undergo a ceaseless pain. 

The Hebrew word “Sheol,” as is well known, is 
variously translated in the Authorised Version of 
the Bible; it is “hell,” “the grave,” “the pit,” and 
so on. One of the signal services of the Revised 
Version is that it brings out the conception of 
Sheol into a clear and definite light. 

Sheol, then, is the under-world, the world of 
spirits. Into it all men descend. “What man is 
he that shall live and not see death,” says one of 

1 In the part of this essay which relates to the Hebrew Sheol, I 
have been much indebted to Professor Salmond’s treatise on The 
Christian Doctrine of Immortality , book ii., chap, ii., pp. 198 sqq. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


97 


the Psalmists, “that shall deliver his soul from 
the power of Sheol ? ” 1 All the dead are there, the 
rich and the poor, the just and the unjust, the lord 
and his slaves, fathers and mothers, young men and 
maidens, and little children. In the Book of Prov¬ 
erbs it is told that Sheol is one of the four things that 
are “never satisfied,” and “say not, It is enough .” 2 

Sheol is contrasted with the upper world of light 
and life. It lies deep down in the bowels of the 
earth. It is “ a land of darkness, as darkness itself; 
and of the shadow of death, without any order, and 
where the light is as darkness .” 3 It is a land of 
silence and sadness and immortal sleep, a land in 
which the Almighty shows no marvels, and the soul 
wanders in a random life. 

What or where Sheol is, the Scripture tells not, 
except in words as dubious as these. It is a place 
but not a place, a home but a home unwelcome, a 
mere negation of all that makes life sweet and dear. 

Yet into it, as has been said, all men descend at 
death. There is no difference. Manifold as is the 
fate of the myriads of human beings in life, in 
Sheol it is one. The thought of a distinction 
among the dead, whether it be due to rank or 

1 Psalm lxxxix. 48. 2 Proverb xxx. 15, 16. 3 Job x. 22. 


H 


98 the hope of immortality 

character in the present life, is foreign to the 
Hebrew conception of Sheol. The good and the 
evil, the happy and the miserable, are alike there. 
A life unending and unbroken — a life which is but 
as the shadow of the present —awaits them all. All 
go unto one place; for all there is one fate. 

It is not impossible to deduce from the words 
of Holy Scripture some idea, though faint and 
feeble, of the life imagined in Sheol. When 
the spirit is said to go down into Sheol, it is 
the man’s personality which survives. But it 
is his personality alone. He is the same man, 
but he is no more the man endowed with his 
proper faculties of will, emotion, intellect and 
conscience. He is but the shadow of himself, as 
his life is no longer real and actual, but shadowy. 
He is the same man ; for others can recognise him, 
and he them, in the world of spirits ; but all that 
gives strength and purpose to life is gone from him. 
No words can describe the vacuity of the life in 
Sheol better than some of the Preacher, Koheleth 
or Ecclesiastes: “The living know that they shall 
die: but the dead know not anything, neither have 
they any more a reward, for the memory of them is 
forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


99 


their envy is now perished; neither have they any 
more a portion for ever in anything that is done 
under the sun. . . . Whatsoever thy hand findeth 
to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, 
nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol, 
whither thou goest.” 1 

As in the Homeric Hades, so too in the Scriptural 
Sheol the loss of human interests and associations 
is acutely regretted. That such a life should be 
worth living in comparison with the life of earth is 
a thought which does not enter the mind of the 
heathen poet or the Hebrew Psalmist. They who 
live in Sheol are, as it were, but shadowy kings on 
shadowy thrones, men who have lost the pleasure of 
knowledge, the capacity and even the memory of 
friendship, the hope and desire of better things. 
They can no more learn or labour or be happy. 
They can but cast their eyes half-consciously back¬ 
wards to their own past, and, remembering but 
imperfectly what it was, pray that their present 
should be even as the past. 

But to the Hebrew poets and thinkers it was not 
the loss of human interests and associations that 
seemed the most painful deprivation. They believed 

1 Ecclesiastes ix. 5, 6, 10. 


IOO 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


that the spirits in Sheol were cut off not only from 
Man, but from God. In Sheol there was no room 
for praise or prayer, no room for communion with 
the Eternal. It is difficult to over-estimate the 
pathos of such words as these, spoken by devout 
Jews to whom the presence of God was as life 
itself: “ What profit is there in my blood, when I 
go down to the pit ? Shall the dust praise Thee ? 
Shall it declare Thy truth ? ” 1 “ In death there is 

no remembrance of Thee ; in Sheol who shall give 
Thee thanks ? ” 2 “ Shall Thy lovingkindness be 

declared in the grave ? or Thy faithfulness in 
destruction ? Shall Thy wonders be known in the 
dark ? and Thy righteousness in the land of forget¬ 
fulness ?” 3 “Sheol cannot praise Thee; death 
cannot celebrate Thee; they that go down into the 
pit cannot hope for Thy truth.” 4 

These words are enough, though it were easy to 
multiply them, and they prove that the most devout 
and spiritually-minded Jews looked forward to Sheol 
as a place which none could escape, and yet which 
none could enter without a mournful sinking of 
heart. Sorrow, failure, weariness, despondency — 


1 Psalm xxx. 9. 

3 Psalm lxxxviii. II, 12. 


2 Psalm vi. 5. 

4 Isaiah xxxviii. 18. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


loi 


these are the thoughts suggested by Sheol. And, 
still more, when the spirit of a man went down to 
Sheol, it abandoned the hope of a better life. The 
destiny of Sheol was universal, and it was eternal. 
None might escape going down into it, and none 
that went down might return. In it the highest and 
the lowest of mankind, the saints and the sinners, 
those whose lives had been the blessings and those 
whose lives had been the curses of the world, were 
alike, and alike eternally. In the mournful words of 
the patriarch Job, “As the cloud is consumed and 
vanisheth away; so he that goeth down to Sheol 
shall come up no more.” 1 

Such was the second stage of Jewish belief'touch¬ 
ing the future of the soul; it was the second, but it 
could not be final. 

The belief in Sheol is a denial of the soul’s 
extinction, it is an assertion of the soul’s existence 
after death; but it possesses no element of the 
moralising, sanctifying associations, no satisfaction 
of the hopes and yearnings and aspirations which 
cluster and, so long as human nature remains 
unchanged, will cluster still around the creed of 
Immortality. 


1 Job vii. 9. 


102 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


There is a third stage, not altogether clearly 
defined, in Hebrew theology. 

That theology had rejected the idea of annihilation 
and had so created the belief in Sheol; but in pro¬ 
cess of time it rejected the idea of Sheol as the 
receptacle of all the spirits of men. In both cases 
the process was moral rather than intellectual. 

To the student of the Old Testament, if he stops 
short of the prophetical books, it becomes clear that 
the early Hebrew writers, having limited their 
religious conceptions to the present world, were 
often at a loss for the means of reconciling the 
Divine justice with the actual conditions and dispen¬ 
sations of human life. The simple theory of the 
Pentateuch, that temporal felicity is the reward 
of temporal virtue, broke down. Th6 Book of Job 
— perhaps the earliest book in the Bible —is itself a 
protest against that theory ; for every reader of the 
book must feel that the restoration of Job to all and 
more than all his temporal blessings in the last 
chapter is at the best an inadequate solution of the 
problem with which the book attempts to deal. 
But it is in the Psalms that the sense of 'an unsolved 
mystery in human life assumes the most definite 
form. One of the Psalmists confesses in touching 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


103 


language how the mystery puzzled and distressed 
him, and how insoluble it seemed, until he went 
into the sanctuary of God, though even there the 
solution which occurred to him was only the 
assurance that the punishment of sin, however long 
it may be delayed, is actually accomplished in the 
present life. “Until I went,” he says, “into the 
sanctuary of God, then understood I their end. 
Surely Thou didst set them (the wicked) in slippery 
places; Thou castedst them down into destruction. 
How are they brought into desolation, as in a 
moment! they are utterly consumed with terrors. 
As a dream when one awaketh, so, O Lord, when 
Thou awakest, Thou shalt despise their image.” 1 

But the facts of life are positive; and they tell so 
strongly against the present necessary connexion of 
moral virtue and temporal success that the thoughts 
of men were inevitably drawn beyond the limits 
of the present world, and in proportion as the 
moral contradictions of life pressed themselves upon 
the conscience, the belief in the soul’s Immortality 
assumed a greater strength and solidity. 

Thoughtful and devout men felt instinctively that 
religion demanded a life other and larger than the 
1 Psalm lxxiii. 17-20. 


104 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


present. But Sheol was no satisfaction of that 
demand. For the two innate ideas which have in 
the course of human history rendered the belief in 
Immortality axiomatic are the longing of the spirit 
of man for continued existence and the desire of the 
conscience for a vindication of God’s moral dealing 
with His children. 

But the life of Sheol was too faint and shadowy, 
too near to death, to afford the sense of Immortality. 
And the life of Sheol, being in its nature the same 
for the good and the evil, left the moral problem of 
the conscience where it had been. 

Thus the thinkers who in the later days of the 
monarchy tried to face the problem of life could not 
rest in the mere doctrine of the Sheol; they had 
taken one step, and they must take yet another. 
That step, as will be seen, was the conception of a 
spiritual and retributory Immortality. 

It cannot be denied that in this case as in others 
the religious ideas of the Hebrew nation were at 
once quickened and purified by the painful expe¬ 
rience of the Captivity. The effect of the Captivity 
in its influence upon Jewish thought and Jewish 
sentiment was profound. It finds no parallel, or 
finds it only in the effect produced by the capture 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


105 

and destruction of Jerusalem under Titus upon the 
mind of the early Christian Church. These great 
events were strong, cleansing moral forces. 

The destruction of Jerusalem swept away the 
local or national limitations which might have 
fettered the free development of the Christian 
Church. The Captivity, by breaking the continuity 
of the Jewish national life, threw the thoughts of 
the devout Israelites back upon the relation of the 
individual soul to God. Thus it purified religion. 
It put an end to the idolatrous ritual which had 
come to be associated with the Monotheism of 
Israel. It awakened the sentiment of sacred personal 
responsibility as appears in such passages as that of 
Ezekiel: “ The son shall not bear the iniquity of the 
father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of 
the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall 
be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked 
shall be upon him.” 1 Above all, it was the Captivity 
which led men to look for the Divine benediction, 
not in any national earthly prosperity, however 
great, but in that spiritual satisfaction which is the 
boon of all who, in any age or any land, repose their 
simple faith in God. 


1 Ezekiel xviii. 20. 


io6 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


Thus the conception of a personal Immortality 
rose before the eyes of men. It was the natural 
outcome of devout religious thought concentrating 
itself upon personal character and personal respon¬ 
sibility. The conception, it is true, had dawned 
upon men’s eyes before the Captivity. It is enough 
to quote the wonderful words of the patriarch Job. 
“I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall 
stand up at the last upon the earth : And after my 
skin hath been thus destroyed, yet from my flesh 
shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself, 
and mine eyes shall behold, and not another. My 
reins are consumed within me.” 1 The translation 
is that of the Revisers of the Old Testament, and, 
as so translated, the passage implies that for Job 
himself there is a Redeemer or a Vindicator; that 
Job shall die, but that his Redeemer shall live and 
live eternally; that though his skin shall wither 
and his flesh decay, yet shall Job behold his Re¬ 
deemer, who is God; that he shall see Him with 
his own eyes, and, as it were, face to face, and his 
reins shall be consumed with the transport of the 
vision. 

But it is in the Psalms and prophecies of the Exilic 

1 Job xix. 25-27. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


107 

or Post-exilic period that the faith in personal 
Immortality becomes most impressive. Let the 
following passages evince it: 

1. The 49th Psalm tells of the proud and impious 
men who trust in their riches as going down into the 
darkness of Sheol, but it tells also of a better fate laid 
up for the righteous. “ Like sheep they are laid 
in Sheol.” “Death shall feed on them . . . and 
their beauty shall consume in Sheol from their 
dwelling. But God will redeem my soul from the 
power of Sheol; for he shall receive me.” 1 

2. The 73rd Psalm rises, like the 49th, to a higher 
thought than that of Sheol. “ Nevertheless I am 
continually with Thee. Thou hast holden me by my 
right hand. Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel, 
and afterward receive me to glory.” 2 

3. Hosea’s prophecy may be thought to contain 
the first idea, not of Immortality alone, but of 
Resurrection. “ I will ransom them from the 
power of Sheol; I will redeem them from death : O 
death, I will be thy plagues; O Sheol, I will be thy 
destruction.” 3 Such are his words, and they are 
echoed by St. Paul in the great chapter which 
Christian mourners know by heart. 

1 Psalm xlix. 14, 15. 2 Psalm lxxiii. 23, 24. 8 Hosea xiii. 14. 


log THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

4. Ezekiel’s vision 1 of the dry bones may perhaps 
be national rather than individual; it may typify the 
resurrection of a nation and not of its members. 
“Son of man,” he writes, “these bones are the 
whole house of Israel.” Yet it is difficult to believe 
that they who read of the breath coming from the 
four winds upon the bones that filled the valley until 
“ they lived and stood up upon their feet, an exceed¬ 
ing great army,” should have failed to catch the 
inspiration of a living personal Immortality. 

5. Still stronger and more striking is the prophecy 
of Isaiah, designed to comfort the chosen people in 
their affliction. “ Thy dead men shall live, together 
with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and 
sing, ye that dwell in dust; for thy dew is as the dew 
of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead.” 2 

6. And this glowing hope — so sacred and sublime 
— which pervades the later canonical books of the 
Old Testament finds its consummation in the closing 
chapter of Daniel’s prophecy. “ But go thou thy 
way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and stand 
in thy lot at the end of thy days.” 3 

It were easy to pass from these passages to the 
teaching of our Lord in the Gospels. But between 

1 Ezekiel xxxvii. 1-14. 2 Isaiah xxvi. 19. 3 Daniel xii. 13. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


109 


the prophetical writings and the Gospels there is a 
link which is too frequently forgotten. That link 
is the Apocrypha. 

It is one of the curious facts of ecclesiastical 
history, as Dr. Salmon has observed, that the action 
of the Council of Trent in placing the Apocrypha 
upon a level with the canonical writings of the Old 
and New Testament has led the Reformed Churches 
to disparage the Apocrypha. Yet the value of the 
Apocrypha is great as shedding light upon Jewish 
religious beliefs and hopes in the four centuries 
which lie between the close of the Old Testament 
Canon and the birth of our Lord, and upon none 
more than upon the faith in Immortality. “The 
Apocrypha,” says Dr. Salmon, 1 “contains evidence 
that, in the later times to which it belongs, the doc¬ 
trine of a future life had taken hold of the people as 
it had not done earlier. The third part of the Homily 
on the Fear of Death offers proofs of the belief in 
a future life held by ‘the holy fathers of the old 
law,’ but these proofs are taken exclusively from the 
Book of Wisdom. And it would not be possible 
to replace the two lessons for All Saints’ Day by 

1 Speaker's Commentary. General Introduction to the Apocrypha, 
§ 73 - 


I IO 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


two other Old Testament chapters expressing the 
same belief with equal distinctness.” 

The belief in Immortality is not always in the 
Apocrypha expressed with equal clearness and cer¬ 
tainty, but it is there. 

The following passages of the Book of Wisdom 
will show how strong the belief was and how greatly 
it had been developed. “ God created man to be 
immortal, and made him to be an image of His own 
eternity.” 1 “The souls of the righteous are in the 
hand of God, and there shall no torment touch 
them. In the sight of the unwise they seem to die, 
and their departure is taken for misery, and their 
going from us to be utter destruction ; but they are 
in peace. For though they be punished in the sight 
of men, yet is their hope full of Immortality.” 2 
“ The righteous live for evermore; their reward also 
is with the Lord, and the care of them is with the 
Most High.” 3 “To know Thee is perfect righteous¬ 
ness : yea, to know Thy power is the root of 
Immortality.” 4 

Along with these passages, which express a belief 
in Immortality as the reward of holy lives, others 


1 Wisdom of Solomon ii. 23. 
8 Ibid. v. 15. 


2 Ibid. iii. 1-4. 
4 Ibid. xv. 3. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


ill 


occur, not always definite or consistent, but suggest¬ 
ing the doctrine of retribution for the wicked. 

“They,” i.e ., the unrighteous, “shall see him,” i.e., 
the wise, “ and despise him; but God shall laugh 
them to scorn, and they shall hereafter be a vile 
carcase, and a reproach among the dead for 
evermore. . . . And when they cast up the 

accounts of their sins, they shall come with fear, 
and their own iniquities shall convince them to 
their face.” 1 “ Over them only was spread an 

heavy night, an image of that darkness which should 
afterwards receive them : but yet were they unto 
themselves more grievous than the darkness.” 2 

In the Book of Wisdom, then, appears the thought 
of a life surviving the grave, and of that life as 
containing in itself the reward of virtue and the 
penalty of sin. It is not uniformly or consistently 
maintained in the Apocrypha. It is strong in one 
book, as in the Wisdom , weak or fitful in another, 
as in Ecclesiasticus; at the most it is a hope or 
an aspiration rather than a faith ; and it is only, 
as I think, in the Books of the Maccabees that the 
faith becomes definite and sure. The history of 
these books is not less inspiring than instructive. 

1 Wisdom of Solomon iv. 18, 20. 2 Ibid. xvii. 21. 


11 2 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


It is in the nature of a supreme national agony to 
elicit great thoughts and high aspirations. What the 
struggle of the Persian wars was to Aischylus and 
the struggle of the Reformation to Shakespeare, all 
that, and more than that, was the struggle against 
Antiochus Epiphanes to the contemporaries of the 
Maccabees. There is no occasion then for surprise 
that this should be the time when the thought of 
Immortality begins to dominate men’s minds. Thus 
in the story of the seven brethren who were martyred 
and their mother occur these passages : 

“ When he,” the fourth son, “ was ready to die, he 
said thus, It is good, being put to death by men, to 
look for hope from God to be raised up again by 
Him: as for thee”—he is addressing the king — 
“thou shalt have no resurrection to life.” 1 And 
again in the story of Nicanor, “When as his blood 
was now quite gone, he plucked out his bowels, and 
taking them in both his hands he cast them upon 
the throng, and calling upon the Lord of life and 
spirit to restore him those again, he thus died.” 2 

Passages such as these imply a faith not only in 
a spiritual life transcending the present, but indeed 
in a corporeal resurrection. 

1 2 Maccabees vii. 14. 2 ibid. x j v ^5 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


n 3 


Thus the agony of the Maccabean struggle set the 
crown upon the Jewish desire for Immortality. That 
which had been a despair, then a dream, then a hope, 
then an aspiration, became a fixed article of belief. 

To sum up what has been said: By the time 
when the canon of the Old Testament closed in 
Malachi, or soon afterwards, and certainly before the 
coming of our Lord, the thought of the personal 
soul as endowed with Immortality had dawned 
as a vision of desire upon the hearts of the devout 
and religious Israelites. And not only so, but it 
was acknowledged that the soul, more than the 
body, more than the intellect, was the part of 
Man that was most closely related to his Maker. 
The soul would-survive the body. It would inherit 
an eternal life. It would enter into the Divine 
Presence. It would attain the celestial beatitude. 
This was the thought which animated the Jews 
in their contests with their enemies, which gave 
them faith and courage and endurance, and which 
made them invincible, as all nations have been in¬ 
vincible when the certainty of the Divine protecting 
grace has possessed their minds. 

The Jewish world, then, at the coming of our 
Lord stood, as it were, prepared for His teaching. 


i 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


114 

The line of thought touching Immortality in the 
Apocrypha is a true prceparatio evangelica. 

The teaching of our Lord carries the doctrine 
of the soul to the highest point which it has reached 
or can reach. It is the supreme insuperable stage 
in the belief of the soul’s Immortality. 

But about His teaching in general, and in this 
matter especially, it needs to be said that He does 
not so much teach new truths, but He changes the 
perspective of truths. In His Gospel the soul is 
not forgotten, nor is the body, but the relation 
between them is transformed. It is no more the 
body — no more the present life — that seems 
important. The body is inconsiderable in com¬ 
parison of the soul. The present is inconsiderable 
in comparison of the future. 

Our Lord does not teach the present or future 
existence of the soul. He takes that existence for 
granted. What he does is to emphasise the intrinsic 
and absolute moment of the life of the soul. How 
awful, how impressive are His words! “ What is a 

man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and 
lose his own soul ? or what shall a man give in 
exchange for his soul ?” 1 And again, “Fear not 


1 St. Matthew xvi. 26. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


Ix 5 

them which kill the body, but are not able to kill 
the soul; but rather fear Him that is able to destroy 
both soul and body in hell .” 1 That the soul, 
religiously considered, is of such value as infinitely 
to transcend all other parts of human nature is, it 
may be said, an axiom of His creed. 

And in conformity to the value which He set 
and His disciples after Him, upon the soul was 
His conception, and theirs in obedience to Him, 
of His own redeeming work upon the Cross. It 
was not for the bodies or minds of men that He 
died, but for their souls. Thus St. Peter says of 
Him, “Whom having not seen, ye love, in Whom 
though now ye see Him not, yet believing ye rejoice 
with joy unspeakable and full of glory; receiving 
the end of your faith, even the salvation of your 
souls.” 2 

This is the substance — the very heart — of the 
Christian Faith. 

“ Why all the souls that were were forfeit once, 

And He that might the vantage best have took 
Found out the remedy.” 8 

It is the Atonement as taught by the writers of 

1 St. Matthew x. 28. 2 2 Peter i. 8, 9. 

3 Shakespeare, Measure for Measure , Act ii., Scene ii. 


116 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

the New Testament, by St. Paul especially, and by 
the fathers of the Church. 

Salvation is a spiritual term. It is a deliverance 
not of the body or the intellect but of the soul, a 
deliverance not from pains or sorrows or sufferings, 
but from sin. Nay, it may often happen that 
physical and mental sufferings are the conditions 
of spiritual good, and, if so, they are blessings, 
though in disguise. 

The Church of Christ, despite her manifold lapses 
and errors, has not lost the thought or the sight 
of her Master’s teaching. She may serve the bodily 
interests of men ; she has nobly served them. She 
has shown by her example that it is not where the 
body aspires to the first place in the life of Man, 
but where it holds the second place as inferior to 
the soul that it attains to its true and proper dignity; 
asylums, hospitals, infirmaries, and homes of refuge 
are the witnesses of her charity; but it is not for 
these things that she exists. She exists to save 
men’s souls. Her Divine Founder was the Healer 
of men’s bodies as well as of their souls, but it was 
for their souls that He died. And all that the 
Church has done or can do must be subordinated 
to her one essential work of saving souls. For 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


7 


this she was born, for this she came into the world; 
it is her function, her very life, and rather than 
surrender this she would die. Such is the belief 
of the Church of Christ, and from it issue two or 
three consequent beliefs which it is right to specify. 

The first is the consciousness of sin. That con¬ 
sciousness is strictly a religious sentiment. Human 
philosophies ignore or impair the sense of sin. 
They recognise crime, they do not recognise sin. It 
is because they have no strong realisation of the 
soul’s personal life. For sin (apart from external 
consequences) is a stain upon the soul, and, if the 
soul be that for which the Saviour died, then how 
terrible is a stain upon it! There is no deeper need 
of the present day than to revivify the decadent or 
dying sense of sin. 

Yet again, the value set upon the soul in our 
Lord’s teaching affects (as has been already inti¬ 
mated) the estimate of the sorrows, sufferings and 
disappointments which are inevitable parts of hu¬ 
man destiny. It expands the significance of the 
word “good,” which is too often limited to physical 
and corporeal benefits. But the good of the soul 
may be the exact opposite of a physical good. A 
privation which depresses the body may be itself 


118 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

an elevation of the soul. Therefore, the Christian 
or the religious man in general, having regard to 
the soul, and not only so but to the soul as endowed 
with Immortality, may well accept and rejoice in 
such a fate as is contrary to the dispositions and 
inclinations of the body. The ascetic life, with its 
manifold, mysterious applications, depends upon the 
regard paid to the soul. 

It is in the nature of the soul too that there lies 
the secret of the great distinction which was not 
known even as a fancy to the classical pagan world, 
though that world was so clever and refined, but 
is an axiom of every modern polity — the distinction 
between the world and the Church, between the 
secular life and the spiritual, between the things 
which in their nature are temporal and the things 
which are eternal and Divine. What the issue of 
that distinction may be in the coming days none can 
tell, but it touches the very nature of Man. It 
determines what should be his character and his 
conduct in the crises of life. It renders the actions 
and even the language of one section of society un¬ 
familiar, if not unintelligible, to the other. But if the 
soul be transcendently greater than the body, then 
they who render it its due importance will win the day. 


HISTORY OF THE BELIEF 


119 

The conclusions and inferences of this chapter 
may be briefly stated as follows: 

The conception, more or less vague, of the human 
spirit or soul as in its nature surviving the bodily 
life appears to be universal among the primitive and 
savage races of mankind. That conception was 
originally crude and material; it has been slowly 
refined into spirituality. 

It was the destiny of the Jewish people, though 
they were late in realising the conception of a future 
spiritual existence, to accept it eventually in its 
purest form and to commend it most persuasively 
to mankind. 

That conception, first imagined by the Psalmists 
and prophets, and afterwards purified in the 
Apocryphal literature, was elevated to its sublime 
dignity by Jesus Christ. He taught not only the 
existence and the pure spirituality of the soul, but 
its paramount superiority to any other part, and 
to all the other parts, of human nature. 

This superiority was the axiom of His own re¬ 
demptive work. It is equally the axiom of all 
Christian devotion and philanthropy. 

Religion is, in a word, a cultivation of the soul. 
Beyond this cultivation no religious system or 
creed can ever rise. 


CHAPTER III 

VALUE OF THE BELIEF 

We have seen what is the true belief in the soul’s 
Immortality, and how it arose and was historically 
developed. We have seen that it has been purged, 
by slow degrees, not without difficulty, of the mate¬ 
rial grossness originally attaching to it, and has be¬ 
come a pure spiritual faith. But it remains to ask — 
What is the bearing of this belief upon the common 
daily practical human life ? Would the world be 
affected, and if so, how affected? would it be the 
better or the worse, if the belief in Immortality 
should cease ? 

This chapter, it is necessary to say, is concerned 
solely with the value of the belief — not with its truth 
or its probability, but with its value. There is no 
assumption that, because a belief is valuable, there¬ 
fore it is true. It may indeed be urged upon the 
hypothesis of a beneficent Almighty Providence that 


120 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


I 2 I 


it is not probable that Man would be left in the 
unhappy position of finding a belief to be essential 
or important to his moral welfare and yet to be false. 
The belief in God then lends a certain strength to 
the argument from the value or necessity of any 
other belief to its truth. But the belief in God may 
or may not be treated as reasonable. The object of 
this chapter is to inquire the value of the belief in 
Immortality without any regard to its validity. But 
in no part of this essay is candour or moderation 
more necessary, and in none, perhaps, is it more 
difficult. 

It is argued that men have lived good lives, and 
even lives of special and remarkable virtue, without 
the sanction or motive of an immortal hope; that 
they have loved righteousness for its own sake, with¬ 
out any thought of reward or penalty; and that it is 
a foolish policy therefore to make the duty or possi¬ 
bility of virtuous living dependent in any sense 
upon a belief which has been shown to be not essen¬ 
tial, and which may not improbably prove to be 
fallacious. It is better, according to this argument, 
so to educate and discipline mankind, that they may 
feel virtue to be its own reward. 

That good and noble lives have been lived in the 


122 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


absence of religious belief, in the absence of a 
belief in Immortality, is probable enough; it will 
readily be admitted by Christians. There is not so 
much virtue in the world that it can be right or wise 
to disparage what there is. The theory that human 
nature is absolutely corrupt is disproved by human 
nature itself. And if it were absolutely corrupt, it 
would be incapable of responding to the appeal 
which religion makes to it, and religion would 
languish or die. The sanctions and motives of 
religion do not re-create human nature; they take it 
as it is ; they elevate and purify it; they could not 
find root in human nature if the soil were utterly 
hard. No doubt the virtue as well as the vice of 
human nature may be exaggerated. Anti-Christian 
writers have made too much of the one, as Christian 
writers of the other; for human nature is not wholly 
good or wholly bad, but is composed of good and 
bad qualities in different degrees, although, if no 
external influences were brought to bear upon it, it 
would probably sink, instead of rising, in moral 
dignity. But Theology forfeits the confidence of 
sensible and reasonable thinkers, if it denies such 
• tendencies to goodness as exist in human nature, for 
the sake of magnifying the work of the Divine grace 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


123 


in human hearts and lives. That human nature is 
crossed, as it were, by a dark streak or flaw, which is 
what is called in the language of Theology “ original 
sin,” is one belief; that it is absolutely vile is quite 
another. The former accords with the facts of con¬ 
science and history. The latter is a desperate con¬ 
clusion to which men have not come spontaneously, 
but have felt themselves driven at times by the 
cogency of their own theological premisses. Still, 
grave as is the mistake of representing human nature 
bad, it is a yet graver mistake to represent it as 
wholly good. The simple truth of human nature 
seems to be that it is prone partly to goodness, partly 
to evil; but that, if it is to ascend to a high moral 
elevation, it needs all, or more than all, the help and 
support that systems of belief or laws of conduct 
have ever afforded it. 

Upon a study of human history or of the human 
soul it is impossible to doubt that Man, in spite of 
his innate promptings to righteousness, can ill afford 
to dispense with any incentive or motive to virtuous 
living. But of such incentives the belief in God, 
and, as its corollary, the belief in Immortality, is the 
strongest. And it is only too sadly apparent that 
human nature, though it be reinforced with this 


T 24 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


strong motive to morality, has found hard work in 
making its way through failure and suffering to the 
gates of the Celestial City. 

It is not indeed altogether safe to argue from the 
assumed integrity of certain lives, whether Christian 
or non-Christian. Men are not in general competent 
judges of each others lives. They see only what is 
obvious and external. It is God who reads the heart. 
His alone is the unerring Judgment-Seat. Of the 
sacred rules laid down by Christ for human conduct 
none is more equitable or charitable than this, 
“Judge not, that ye be not judged.” The fallibility 
of human, the accuracy of Divine judgment, are the 
principles which nerve and inspire the personal life. 
It is right that man should be judged, but that he 
should be judged by One Whose judgment is just. 
For except upon the supposition of a Divine 
Almighty Judgment, it seems that there is no 
security, and little probability, that justice will be 
done to individuals in this life or afterwards. 

It may be admitted, however, that men have lived 
good lives without the sanction of religion. It may 
be admitted, too, that men possessing religious faith 
have often failed in the practice of virtue. But to 
make these admissions is not to admit that religious 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


2 5 


faith as a motive is effectual. It is only to allow — 
what experience attests — that motives are not so 
influential as they ought in logic to be upon human 
lives. Man is not a creature of reason only, but of 
desire, emotion, sentiment, as well as reason ; and 
the fact that motives do not always work their 
logical effect, is an argument, not for destroying or 
impairing, but for fortifying the motives. For 
motives are operative in proportion to their own 
strength and to the strength of the belief with which 
men apprehend them; if they are inadequate there¬ 
fore, it is necessary to strengthen them. 

And when it is said that virtue is its own reward, 
this is a statement which may be either a truism or a 
paradox. To whom is virtue its own reward ? Not 
indeed to everybody; so much is plain; for if virtue 
were everywhere its own reward, and were known to 
be so, the world would be virtuous ; it would not be, 
as in fact it is, a scene of tangled good and evil, 
where generous aspirations are too often marred by 
deep and melancholy failures. Man, it has been 
said, stands alone among animate beings, in that he 
recognises and admits his own true interest and yet 
acts against it. Such human action is indisputable; 
but it is an evidence that virtue, if it is sometimes a 


126 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


pleasure, is or may be at other times a painful sacri¬ 
fice. Suppose that a person who has lived long 
years in sin determines to break by resolute effort 
the bands of sinful habit, as when a drunkard takes 
the pledge of abstinence from drink ; his virtuous 
action is not pleasant to him, but painful ; it is so 
painful that he often sinks under the burden of it. 
The first step in the path of penitence must be diffi¬ 
cult ; there are times when it cannot be taken except 
under the constraining influence of a belief in the 
righteous anger of God against iniquity. 

It is true indeed that one who begins by abstain¬ 
ing from evil in the belief that it will involve shame 
or. punishment, may in the end rise to so high a 
moral elevation as to find in the practice of virtue 
not only a pleasure but a passionate delight. This, 
however, is the supreme attainment of the moral 
life. Few are they— and those the saints — who have 
aspired to it. What a wilful error it would be to 
treat a temper so sublime as if it were the common 
lot of ordinary men and women ! The love of virtue 
for its own sake is the reward of those who have 
practised virtue as a hard duty. It is not the sinner 
who loves virtue, but the saint. Yet saints are few, 
and sinners many, and how a sinner may be 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


12 7 


brought to lead the saintly life is the most difficult 
problem of religion or morality. 

The law of the moral life has nowhere, I think, 
been expressed more truly than in a passage of the 
ancient Greek poet, Hesiod, “ Thou mayest choose 
vice and plenty of it, and the choice shall not be 
hard. The path is smooth, and vice dwells at thy 
door. But the immortal Gods have set toil at the 
threshold of virtue; long and arduous is the way 
thereto, and at the first it is rough ; but when a man 
has reached the summit, then is virtue easy, though 
so hard.” 1 It is the privilege of the saint not only to 
practise virtue but to love it. To one who has spent 
his life in sanctity, virtue may be, and often is, its 
own reward. It is so to him, it is not so to others. 
The sinner, to whom his sin is not a pain, but, at 
least for a time, a satisfaction, needs an overmaster¬ 
ing motive, if he is to turn his back upon sin and to 
set his face towards the vision of holiness. The faith 

1 Hesiod, Works and Days, 285 sqq. : 

t^j v pkv toi KaKdrrjTa kolI i\a8bv e<rnv eXkoidai 
j>T)idl<os ' Xe/77 pkv oSbs, pd\a 8' iyyvOi vdiet. 
rrjs 8' aperrjs iSpCbra deoi TTpoirapoidev eOrjKav 
adavaroi ’ paxpbs 8k xal tipdios olpos ks abriju 
xai Tprixbs ToirpCdTov ' iirTjv 8 ’ els Axpov txrjTai , 
p-rfiSLr] 8r) eireira irkXei, x a ^ eir V ire P tovoa. 


128 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


in Immortality affords this motive, and there is no 
other faith that equally affords it. It is impossible to 
deny or dispute the bearing of the faith in Immor¬ 
tality upon conduct, unless it be supposed either that 
human nature stands in no need of motives to virtue, 
or that motives do not influence action. But these 
suppositions are untenable. They display a singular 
ignorance of the human nature to which they relate; 
they render the theory of conduct not logical or 
intelligible, but chaotic. For Man has sore need, as 
experience proves, of the incentives and inducements 
to virtue. 

How can it be argued that men are enamoured of 
virtue and disposed to practise it with a pure, un¬ 
selfish affection, when the world is strewn with the 
wreckage of lives, and hopes are frustrated and 
opportunities wasted and promises end in despair ? 
How can it be said in the face of fraud and cruelty 
and lust ? How can it be said by any one who 
studies himself or the world ? The history of 
humanity and the conscience of each man are alike 
the witnesses that the waves of interest and passion 
are ceaselessly surging against the barrier of human 
morality and threatening to sweep it away. 

Historically Man has been a bad judge of human 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


I 29 

nature. The theologians of old, as has been 
said, could discern in it nothing but evil. Some 
modern thinkers have seemed to discern nothing 
but good. Yet it is simply absurd to speak as 
though men were everywhere and always inclined 
to righteousness, if only they could find some 
sufficient reason for following it. The theological 
doctrine of innate sinfulness is probably truer than 
the opposite doctrine of innate righteousness. He 
who knows himself knows that good and evil are 
ever at war within his soul, and that, if he is to 
refuse the evil and to choose the good, he needs 
the strongest possible motive to morality. For to 
him the Apostle’s words are vividly present as 
expressing the truth of his own personal experience: 
“ I find then a law, that, when I would do good, 
evil is present with me. For I delight in the law 
of God after the inward man ; but I see another law 
in my members, warring against the law of my 
mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law 
of sin which is in my members. O wretched man 
that I am ! Who shall deliver me from the body 
of this death ? ” 1 

So evident is the testimony of human nature to 

1 Romans vii. 21-24. 

K 


30 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


sin as a fact and to the consequent need of moral 
sanctions. Nor is the connexion of belief with 
conduct less evident. For if action, i.e., rational 
action, is not caused by belief, how is it caused ? 
On what principle does a man choose one line 
of action rather than another ? The reason lies, 
as is plain, in his belief. He believes the line which 
he chooses to be right or necessary or expedient. 
He believes that he will be rewarded for taking it 
or punished if he does not take it, whatever the 
form of reward or punishment may be, and thus 
his choice is made. 

Actions then, so far as they are reasonable, are 
the consequences of belief. It is belief which 
determines the choice of actions. 

No doubt the choice is not always, as it ought 
to be, consistently made. Beliefs do not always 
dominate action; for it is subject to counter¬ 
balancing influences such as desires, sentiments, 
interests, and the like. Beliefs, too, may be more 
or less cogent; one belief is authoritative, another 
persuasive, another so faint as to be only suggestive. 
But it remains true that, so far as action is reason¬ 
able, it depends on belief; there is nothing else on 
which it can depend. And if it be so, then there 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


I 3 I 

is no belief which is naturally qualified to exercise 
such influence upon conduct as the faith in Immor¬ 
tality. For when full allowance has been made, 
as it ought to be made, for the circumstances by 
which the natural effect of belief upon action is 
more or less modified, it is mere playing with 
facts to argue that one who limits his view of 
responsibility to the present life and to such laws 
and sanctions as are operative in it, possesses the 
same imperious motive to a moral life as one who 
holds that for all the actions and intentions of 
his life he is ultimately responsible after death at 
the bar of an Almighty and Omniscient Judge. 
The believer in a retributory Immortality is far 
more strongly bound to virtue than others who 
lack this or any such belief; and if the moral level 
of his life is not higher than theirs, his culpability 
is proportionately greater. 

The moral value then of a belief in Immortality 
may now be taken as established. But although the 
faith in Immortality, with such convictions as issue 
from it, may be the most potent motive to morality, 
it is not the only motive. Writers both ancient and 
modern have sometimes set its value too high. 
Thus Cicero says — but who will justify his words? 


i 3 2 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


— “Nemo unquam sine magna spe immortalitatis se 
pro patria offerret ad mortem.” 1 Similarly the 
great French preacher Massillon, in his discourse 
on the Immortality of the Soul, says, “La societe 
universelle des hommes, les lois qui nous unissent 
les uns aux autres, les devoirs les plus sacres et les 
plus inviolables de la vie civile, tout cela n’est fonde 
que sur la certitude d’un avenir. Ainsi si tout 
meurt avec le corps, il faut que l’univers prenne 
d’autres lois, d’autres moeurs, d’autres usages, et que 
tout change de face sur la terre. Les maximes de 
l’equit6, de l’amitie, de l’honneur, de la bonne foi, 
de la reconnaissance ne sont plus que des erreurs 
populaires, puisque nous ne devons rien a des 
hommes, qui ne nous sont rien, auxquels aucun 
noeud commun de culte et d’esperance ne nous lie, 
qui vont demain retomber dans le neant, et qui ne 
sont deja plus.” 2 But the supreme value of a 
faith in Immortality has been nowhere put in 
stronger language than by Robert Hall in his 
once famous sermon on Modern Infidelity con¬ 
sidered with respect to its Influence on Society. The 

1 “No one would ever expose himself to death for his country 
if he had not a strong hope of Immortality.”— Tusc. Disp. i. 15, 32. 

2 De l ’ Immortalite de IA me. 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


T 33 


following passage will serve as a specimen of his 
argument: 

“ As the present world, on sceptical principles, is 
the only place of recompense, whenever the practice 
of virtue fails to promise the greatest sum of present 
good (cases which often occur in reality and much 
oftener in appearance), every motive to virtuous 
conduct is superseded; a deviation from rectitude 
becomes the part of wisdom, and should the path 
of virtue, in addition to this, be obstructed by 
disgrace, torment or death, to persevere would be 
madness or folly, and a violation of the first and 
most essential law of Nature. Virtue, on these 
principles, being in numberless instances at war 
with self-preservation, never can or ought to become 
a fixed habit of the mind.” 

Such passages are no doubt guilty of exaggeration. 
For the truth is that under all moral systems, whether 
actual or possible, some men will be virtuous and 
others vicious, and still more, men will, in their 
characters, exhibit varied blendings or interfacings of 
virtue and vice. Nor indeed is the habit of mind which 
takes pleasure in classifying men as good or evil, 
saved or unsaved, Christian or non-Christian, in any 
high degree salutary or charitable. Divine Omnis- 


134 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


cience alone can distinguish the tares from the 
wheat in the harvest-field of life; to the Divine 
Master men alike stand or fall. It is wise to discuss 
the natural tendencies rather than the actual results 
of moral systems; for it is a safe assumption that 
soon or late the natural tendencies will develope 
and display themselves in experience. 

The singular advantage of the belief in Immor¬ 
tality is that it provides a sanction, and other beliefs 
do not, for the exceptional or extreme cases of 
moral duty. For a moral system must be tested 
by extreme cases. It must provide an adequate 
sanction for morality not only in the ordinary, but 
in the special and sublime, decisions of life. If such 
a system does not meet the extreme cases, if it does 
not in these cases satisfy the demand of the con¬ 
science, then it will ultimately fail in other cases. 

It is rightly demanded then that a moral system 
should justify the supreme manifestations of human 
virtue. If it is incapable of producing saints and 
martyrs, or, in other words, of justifying sanctity 
and martyrdom, it will soon or late fail to produce 
men and women, or to produce many men and 
women, of the virtue which is now assumed to 
be general among Christians. For a moral system 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


*35 


tends ultimately to produce such consequences as 
ordinary people deduce from its principles. No 
moral system of antiquity was illumined by a 
brighter example in its founder’s life than Epicure¬ 
anism ; but the name of Epicurus has in history 
become no more than a synonym for a bon vivant; 
and it has become so because Epicurus preached 
the doctrine of pleasure, and men have accepted 
from him his special doctrine, and have interpreted 
it according to their own disposition. 

It may be taken for granted then that a moral 
system, whatever it may be, will not in practice 
ultimately rise to a higher level than the interpre¬ 
tation which ordinary men and women put upon its 
principles. And here perhaps Robert Hall’s sermon 
may be quoted once more, “ By great and sublime 
virtues are meant those which are called into action 
on great and trying occasions, which demand the 
sacrifice of the dearest interests and prospects of 
human life and sometimes of life itself; the virtues, 
in a word, which by their rarity and splendour 
draw admiration, and have rendered illustrious the 
character of patriots, martyrs and confessors. It 
requires but little reflexion to perceive that what¬ 
ever veils a future world and contracts the limits 


136 the hope of immortality 

of existence within the present life must tend in 
a proportionable degree to diminish the grandeur 
and narrow the sphere of human agency.” 

The matter then would appear to stand in this 
way. The belief in Immortality supplies a sanction 
for all virtues. There is no discipline — no sacrifice 
— so great that it cannot be justified, upon the plain 
assumption that God Who is Almighty will at His 
pleasure within the eternal spaces of futurity re¬ 
compense and satisfy all such virtuous actions as 
are performed, at whatever present loss or sorrow, 
for His sake. 

It is here that upon a secular system of morality 
the ultimate coincidence of virtue with happiness, 
which is the postulate of the human conscience, 
seems to fail. 

The difficulty of such a system is to provide a 
moral sanction for the noblest actions. For such 
a system this life is all. Morality is relative to this 
life. It must find its sanction, its justification, in 
this life. Life becomes then, if not the siimmum 
bonum , yet the condition under which alone the 
summum bonum is attainable. Secular morality, 
as it follows, cannot justify to the individual the 
sacrifice of his life for any cause. To say so is not 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


137 


to say that men have not sacrificed their lives for 
truth and honour without the faith in a personal 
Immortality. Men are not seldom better than their 
creeds. But it is to say that the sacrifice of life is 
not justifiable upon secular principles. The martyr 
acts nobly but irrationally, as there is no recompense 
possible to him when life is taken from him. That 
“ he who loses his life shall find it ” is not a belief 
which secular morality can entertain. The world 
has instinctively felt the danger which belongs to 
the loss of faith in the soul’s Immortality. It 
shrinks from the thought of an atheistical society. 

Yet if it is asked what would be the necessary 
consequence of a purely secular morality, it is 
perhaps not so much that the world would im¬ 
mediately lose virtuous conduct as that it would 
lose the fine or delicate flower of virtue. It would 
lose in fact not virtue but sanctity. Sanctity is the 
flower or fragrance of virtue. How shall I speak 
of it ? It is to virtue what grace is to behaviour, 
what expression is to beauty. It elevates by 
spiritualising, as grace by refining. It is something 
added to virtue, something higher than virtue. The 
saint does often the same actions as the moral 
person, only he does them in a different way. He 


138 the hope of immortality 

is free from worldliness. He thinks not of himself. 
He breathes a serener atmosphere than other men. 
He is nearer to God. 

The difference between sanctity and mere dutiful¬ 
ness was seen, it is said, in the hospitals of Paris, 
when the Sisters of Mercy yielded their place to 
secular nurses. The duty done was the same, yet 
not the same; it missed the special charm of 
devotion, of piety. What, then, was the secret of 
this charm ? It is told that the Sisters whose task 
is hardest and most painful, such as they who spend 
their lives in ministering to the fallen abandoned 
women in the great cities, sometimes feel their hearts 
sinking within them at the contact with so great and 
terrible impurity; then they retire into the little 
chapel set apart for them and pray awhile before the 
altar, and when their prayer is finished, they are 
strengthened again for their ministry. 

It was even so with the Master Himself, Who 
“continued all night in prayer to God.” 

This, or such as this, is indeed the flower of 
sanctity. It is not the avoidance only, but the abhor¬ 
rence of evil. It is not the practice only, but the joy 
of devotion. Yet it is in the power of loving souls, 
however weak. It is delicacy, refinement, purity, 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


139 


yet sacrifice too. In it is something that is unearthly, 
something Divine. For it issues chiefly or solely 
from the example of Him Who, being in the world, 
was yet not of it, but lived above it in the perfect¬ 
ness of an immaculate purity ; for Him alone among 
the children of men evil could not approach or defile, 
and from the cradle to the Cross there rested not 
upon His soul even the passing shadow of sin. 

This it is that the world will lose, if it loses 
religion. 

Yet is there no greater sorrow than the loss of * 
an ideal. For though the ideal be never realised, it 
has the power of attracting thoughts and hopes 
and desires upwards to itself. 

Sanctity is rare among men. The saints are few ; 
but the world is saved by its saints. They alone, it 
may be, ascend to the highest height, and their 
feet are set on the untrodden snow; but others 
struggling heavenwards from the lowlands take hope 
from the vision of the saints. The beliefs and 
habits of religion constitute the saintly life. Apart 
from them there would in the end be no saints. 
And it may be feared that, when the supreme 
attainment of virtue is done away, the moral 
standard of the world would gradually be lowered. 


140 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


And not only would the moral standard be lowered, 
but morality itself would suffer a change. Morality 
is a word of various meaning; it did not mean the 
same thing in the ancient classical as in the modern 
world; it would not mean the same thing in an 
infidel as in a religious society. For the virtues 
which relate to or depend on Immortality, such as 
the reverence for human life, the habit of worship, 
the culture.of purity, would languish, if Immortality 
were no longer a faith. Every religion has its own 
morality, and the morality approved, if not always 
practised, in Christian society, is the morality which 
Jesus Christ taught. 

Thus the value of the belief in Immortality is a con¬ 
clusion arising from a just estimate of human nature. 

While it is admitted that the virtuous tendencies 
of Humanity are the ground upon which the hope 
of human progress rests, it remains true that the 
moral dignity of man is less positive and stable 
than it is sometimes imagined to be. Human virtue 
cannot yet make boast of itself. It is not an 
immutable fact. The best of men are not far 
removed from the worst sins. Humanity stands, 
as it were, on the slope of a high mountain, it 
breathes the pure and bracing air of heaven, but 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


141 

it may soon and easily lose its footing and sink 
backwards into the depths which lie below. 

Great and awful, then, is the responsibility of 
those who would cut away any sanction or support 
of the moral life. But the chief of these sanctions 
and supports is Immortality. 

The faith in Immortality, then, if it be lost, is • 
irreplaceable. 

But it is not only the morality of individuals which 
is at stake in the battle of belief; it is also the 
morality, and with it the felicity, of nations. 

And here it is perhaps worth while to notice that 
it is not so much the wealthy or privileged or cul¬ 
tivated classes who are so dependent upon a faith 
in Immortality; it is, however little they may 
themselves know it, the poor, the ignorant, the 
unhappy, the debased. The faith of these classes 
may be tacit or inarticulate or concealed, as their 
faith in God is often ; but if it exists, though lying 
ever so deep within them, it is a check upon wild 
action and a solace in the sufferings of life. It 
cannot, I think, be proved, but neither can it be 
denied, that the social and political movements, 
indicating in many European countries a discontent 
and an impatience which are dangerous signs of the 


142 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


time, are largely the outcome of the speculations 
which have taught men, in the name of Philosophy 
or Science or any other name, to cast away the 
restraining power of belief in God. Certainly it is 
remarkable that that discontent or impatience in its 
most pronounced form, when it calls itself anarch¬ 
ism, is equally intolerant and contemptuous of autho¬ 
rity, human and Divine; it treats the laws of men 
with as little respect as the laws of God. And, in¬ 
deed, if the faith of the people in God and Immor¬ 
tality is done away, and their privations, their labours, 
their sufferings, remain, is it reasonable to think that 
they will acquiesce in an inequality which was always 
hard to bear and is now felt to be hopeless, because 
it fills the whole space of their existence ? 

The faith in Immortality where it exists is always 
a motive — the strongest of all motives — to a patient 
self-restraint. And not only so, but that faith, . 
whether among individuals or among nations, is a 
spur to moral action. He who possesses it, however 
often he may have failed, yet possesses in himself 
the potency of better things. For human life, 
if it be complete within itself, does not authorise 
an absolute morality. It is the doctrine of Im¬ 
mortality which harmonises duty and reward. For 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


143 


Immortality throws its protecting shield over the 
whole wide field of human duty. It is the pro¬ 
mise that no resolute effort or generous service, no 
refusal of sin, no persistency in virtue, no cup of 
cold water given in charity to a disciple, shall lose 
its reward. Within the sphere of Immortality lies 
the justification for all the demands that conscience 
makes of Humanity. 

But it is not only as a moral motive, it is also as 
a moral satisfaction, that the belief in Immortality 
commends itself to human hearts. It is the one 
belief that sets and can set the mind at rest in the 
contemplation of the ways of Providence. 

It is well to consider what is the proper attitude 
of the finite human mind towards an Infinite Intel¬ 
ligence. Ex hypothesi such a mind is impotent 
to understand the full scope of the Providential 
scheme. It must confess the limitations and im¬ 
perfections of its knowledge. That there should 
be difficulties in the human estimate of Providence 
is only a way of saying that Providence is Divine. 
But it were wrong to look upon these difficulties as 
only so many intellectual hardships; they are moral 
tests; and it is as tests that they are essential 
elements in the Divine dealings with mankind. 


144 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


It is necessary, then, that Man, as a finite being, 
should be subject to doubt in his apprehension 
of Divine Providence. Mystery is the element 
in which Man lives as Man. But mystery, however 
natural, is none the less painful; if it be hopeless, it 
may become intolerable. 

What is it, then, that Man may reverently and not 
unreasonably ask of God ? It is that the mystery of 
life, if as yet unsolved, should not be proved to 
be insoluble. He may not demand to see the 
solution in this life, but he cannot forego the hope 
that it will be seen hereafter. Faith, in short, will 
carry him as far as, but no further than, the words: 
“ What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt 
know hereafter.” That his present knowledge is 
imperfect he may admit; that it can never be com¬ 
pleted he will deny. 

Thus the relation of man to God is, in familiar 
language, as that of a child to his earthly father, 
whose motives he cannot understand but whose 
goodness he trusts implicitly. He waits, but his 
waiting is full of hope. He reposes his trust in God. 
The curtain hangs, as it were, between him and the 
truth on which his heart is set; he cannot tell, he 
can scarcely imagine, what is hidden behind it, but 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


145 


he knows that some day the curtain will be lifted. 
Thus the discipline of this life, the anticipation of a 
life after this, are the consequences issuing from the 
fact of an Invisible Immortal Will in which he 
believes. 

This hope or this faith naturally influences the 
Christian view of life taken as a whole. Life is 
not free from puzzling and distressing features. 
The inequalities of life, for instance, cannot but 
excite a certain feeling of sadness in the mind. It 
is a just moral expectation that all men should 
ultimately enjoy a fair or equal chance of happiness, 
whether it be given them in the present or in the 
future. But upon a survey of the present life men 
are not equal; they do not enjoy the same or nearly 
the same chances. The disparity which exists 
between them is not merely or principally relative 
to such goods as are called external, eg., wealth or 
social circumstances or honour, and if it were so, it 
would be easily overrated ; for of these goods the 
influence upon happiness is probably less than it 
seems to be, as the enjoyment depends upon the 
sense of need, when they are wanting, or of 
appreciation, when they are attained. There is 
reason to think that, if it were possible to compare 


146 the hope of immortality 

the tastes, desires and satisfactions of two persons 
taken from opposite or widely different social strata, 
the positive inequality of happiness would often be 
found to be slight. Still differences of place and 
privilege exist, and they affect the character or 
condition of life. One man is born in such circum¬ 
stances as facilitate the cultivation of virtuous 
habits, another is the victim of hereditary taint or 
vicious example or base associations. Or again, the 
sin of one man is visited with a life-long stigma; 
another, who may be a worse sinner, goes un¬ 
punished. No view of the present human life taken 
in itself can adequately interpret these inequalities; 
they postulate the justice of the Almighty acting in 
an Immortal Existence. Thus the belief in Im¬ 
mortality is in effect the belief that an equalisation 
of human destinies (subject, of course, to human 
freedom) will be realised at the last. 

Pain again is a mystery which has always weighed 
upon the sensitive conscience of mankind. If it be 
considered in relation to the present life, and to that 
alone, it must be said to lack not only beneficence, 
but in a great degree significance. For pain is not 
intelligible, as an element in experience, unless it be 
educative. It must promise, it must more or less 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


147 


promote, a future blessing. In this life its educative 
effect is not always seen. But assume an Immortal 
Life, and pain becomes at once a discipline of whose 
beneficence Man is permitted to catch a glimpse 
even in this life. For pain contains in itself a 
moralising or sanctifying power. Human nature, 
being constituted as it is, can afford as little to 
dispense with pain as it can with death. Death is 
the great solemnising power; it redeems life from 
flippancy, it constrains the most thoughtless souls to 
pause and think. Pain too is the spring of generous 
sympathies and sacrifices. Nay, not so only; but 
it is the special function of pain to evoke the 
sentiments and qualities which are preparatory, as 
it were, to the Eternal Life. Humility, patience, 
resignation, faith, devotion, are spiritual qualities, 
and, as such, they are prophetic of Immortality. It 
follows that pain, although in human eyes it may 
seem mere loss or indignity, is in the Divine view 
a scarcely veiled benediction. Pain is a mark of 
Divine favour, as it creates the temper or character 
which is pleasing to God. Thus it is true that 
“ whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth and 
scourgeth every son whom He receiveth .” 1 


1 Hebrews xii. 6. 


i 4 8 the hope of immortality 

Lastly, death, though it ceases not to be terrible, 
is in the view of Immortality not intolerable. It 
were a hopeless evil, if it were the end. It is not, or 
not necessarily, an evil, if it be not the end of life, 
but a stage or an incident in life itself, if it is, as an 
ancient writer says, “ midway in life.” 1 But this is 
the religious view; it is the Christian view. It 
leaves the future dark, yet vast ; it does not shut the 
door on hope. It invests with deep and awful, yet 
blessed, possibility the shadowy spaces which lie 
behind the veil. 

There is no beatitude vouchsafed to man so great 
as this. No discovery of Philosophy or Art or 
Science is so rich in its solace for anguished souls as 
the revelation of Immortality. That One greater 
than death holds the keys of hell and death is the 
supreme belief to which Humanity rises. I dare to 
say that without it life is not worth living. But to 
those who embrace it life is hopeful, it is sacred, it 
is Divine. 

In the faith of Immortality, then, lies the solution 
of the mystery encircling life and death. What the 

1 Lucan, Pharsalia , 1457 (of the Druids) : 

“ Longae canitis si cognita vitae 
Mors media est.” 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


149 


ultimate solution may be Man knows not. But 
he knows that it is there. In that knowledge 
he is content — nay, happy. His life rests upon 
God. 

So it is that the doctrine of Immortality not only 
coheres, as has been said, with the faith in God, but 
is indispensable to it. The eternity of God and the 
eternity of the individual life are the keys to the 
interpretation of Providence. 

The doctrine of Immortality is of infinite value, 
alike as affording an absolute sanction for the efforts 
and sacrifices of virtue, and as yielding strength to 
human nature in its anxieties, and solace in its bitter 
bereavements. So far, however, it has been treated 
only in its relation to the Divine Economy. It has 
been shown to be a necessary condition of the 
belief in a Providential Government of the world. 

But every doctrine which expresses, or seeks to 
express, the relation of Man to God has its human 
side as well as its Divine. It will necessarily answer 
to the demand of human nature in itself, i.e. f 
without regard to the view which man may take of 
Providence. 

Thus it is necessary in considering Immortality to 
consider some special features of Man’s nature. 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


*5° 

For the object of this chapter is to inquire what 
would be the loss of virtue or happiness, if men 
were forbidden to speculate religiously upon the 
future. This loss will be the measure of the value 
which properly belongs to the belief. 

The passionate longing of mankind for a death¬ 
less life may be regarded, and will hereafter be 
regarded, as an argument. It is here to be treated 
as a need. It is a need which Immortality satisfies, 
and no other doctrine or theory can satisfy it. 

The desire of man for Immortality has not always 
and everywhere been equally strong. In some, if 
not all, of the more refined and cultivated races of 
mankind it has been and is so powerful as to 
amount to an irresistible prejudice. And upon the 
whole, the greater the refinement or the cultivation 
of the race, the more intense is the longing for 
Immortality. 

This desire is in general independent of special 
conditions attaching to the Immortal Life. It is 
not a desire for equalisation or retribution or 
advancement. It is a desire for existence. It is 
an intuitive consciousness of persistency. In Mr. 
Alger’s words, “ It seems clear that the real belief in 
Immortality did not originate from the contem- 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


151 

plation of the phenomena of dreams and shadows 
and echoes, but arose from the inexpugnable self- 
assertion of consciousness, its inability to feel itself 
non-existent.” 1 

This desire, however interpreted, is the more 
remarkable, as it seems to distinguish Man broadly 
from the other animals to which his physical 
structure and character are akin. It is right to 
speak of those animals with reserve, so little is 
known of their nature or sentiments ; but at least 
the appearance is that they take death, like life itself, 
as a natural thing, without any wonder or difficulty 
or pain. Man alone resents and regrets the idea of 
death. He refuses to die. He would sooner live 
in pain than perish in peace. He demands for 
himself unending life. Of all strange and striking 
facts in human history none throws more light upon 
man’s inalienable desire of Immortality, than that 
an everlasting doom of woe should have been found 
in the history of thought a creed less intolerable 
than annihilation or absolute death. 

But there is another way in which it is possible 
to form some estimate of the loss which would fall 
upon Humanity, if by any arbitrary or self-imposed 

1 A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life y p. 728. 





THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


!5 2 

decree it were forbidden to mankind to extend the 
range of their thoughts and hopes and even their 
beliefs beyond and above the limits of the present 
life; and what can be said of it but that it would 
be a blight covering the face of all the earth ? It 
would be a narrowing or impoverishing of all that 
makes human nature sublime. The spring of 
imagination and devotion would be dried up. In 
whatever direction the human spirit might seek to 
move, it would be stayed as if by some invisible 
bar. 

Literature is a witness that human life or thought, 
if it were cut off from the hope of Immortality, 
would become a sterilised thing. For the master¬ 
pieces of literary genius, whether ancient or 
modern, are largely occupied with questions re¬ 
lating to the invisible world. If Man were limited 
to the present, if he might not in fancy or belief 
speculate upon the destiny of the soul when it passes 
at death beyond the sphere of sense, what would 
become — it is not necessary to say of the sacred 
books of all religions — but of the Odyssey or the 
Prometheus Vinctus or the Alcestis or the PEneid or 
the Divina Cornmcdia or Hamlet or Paradise Lost 
or In Memoriam ? The invisible world and all that 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


I 53 


belongs to it have been the nursery of great 
thoughts and burning aspirations. To the high 
theme of Immortality poets, artists, and philosophers, 
no less than preachers or theologians, have been 
drawn by an irresistible attraction. They have 
spent upon it reverent, earnest thought and labour. 
How much light has been so shed upon the dark¬ 
ness encompassing the future of the soul is not now 
the question. It is enough that in seeking to 
illumine the darkness (even though the effort has 
been made in vain), they have enlarged and 
enriched the spiritual thoughts of Humanity, and 
have lifted them to a brighter and purer world. 

For, apart from all particular theories of Immor¬ 
tality, it is the belief in a personal Immortal Life of 
human souls which gives Man his proper dignity 
in the scale of Nature. As Science lowers him in 
his own eyes, Theology exalts him. On the one 
hand he is little higher than the beasts; on the 
other hand he is little lower than the angels. For 
Our Lord in the mysterious passage in which He 
speaks of the angels, says explicitly that they “die 
not.” Death is the lot of Humanity. Deathlessness 
is the boon of the angelic life. Spiritual beings, as 
the angels, cannot die. So too the spirit of Man, as 


i 


I54 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

being itself immortal, approximates to the angelic 
life. 

There is much in Nature which tends to 
overpower human thought. The vast spaces of 
Astronomy, the vast periods of Geology, stand in 
contrast with the narrow limits of human being. 
The mighty powers which Nature now and again 
puts forth in the earthquake or the hurricane or 
the cataclysm reduce Man’s physical activity to 
insignificance. What is to be set against this great 
overmastering thought ? It can be nothing else 
than the belief that Man possesses in himself an 
immortal treasure, and that treasure is the soul. 
The soul is the witness of its own eternity as of its 
own spirituality. It is, as Democritus said, “ the 
house of God .” 1 Or as Epictetus said, every man 
“carries about a God within him.” To know this 
truth is to know the dignity of Man. 

It is no part of this essay to discuss the theory of 
Man’s origin. But among the seeming evidences 
of a lost potency or capacity, as of a vision half- 
forgotten yet half-remembered, is his dissatisfaction 
with himself and the conditions of his being. He 
does not think of himself as of one whose history 
2B t rml 1 xpv X v oUvrtpiov Salami C)n u>yj . 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


155 

has been a continuous progress from a lower to a 
higher state. He has felt always that he might be 
better than he is, and ought to do more than he has 
ever done. He is conscious of powers which do 
not find full play in this world. He is oppressed by 
the sense of contrast between his ideal and the 
realisation which falls so far short of it. Hence his 
spirit is for ever in unrest. What a pain there is 
in human inability to do more work! How waste¬ 
ful and saddening seem the hours spent in sleep ! 
The limitations of his physical senses are distressful 
to him. The imperfection of his moral nature jars 
upon his conscience. He feels within himself the 
yearnings for a sanctity not of earth. Nay, as he 
looks around him his pathetic regret is only intensi¬ 
fied. He erects buildings and they outlive him. 
He makes calculations, such as Halley’s, and he 
may not live to verify them. His purposes are 
immortal. His earthly life closes as a tale that is 
told. With infinite hopes and aspirations, with 
poor sinful deeds, striving and failing and learning 
by failure to strive again, he seems to himself as a 
prince immured in a gloomy prison house. 

But let Man, so cramped and saddened, be 
suddenly invested with the promise or potency of 


!5 6 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


an everlasting life; then his being assumes a new 
dignity, as being fraught with endless issues; his 
actions, his very thoughts, bear the stamp of Immor¬ 
tality ; he is as a pauper who has succeeded 
unexpectedly to an inheritance of vast and ample 
riches. “ I am fully persuaded that one of the best 
springs of generous and worthy actions, is the 
having generous and worthy thoughts of ourselves. 
Whoever has a mean opinion of the dignity of his 
nature, will act in no higher a rank than he has 
allotted himself in his own estimation. If he con¬ 
siders his being as circumscribed by the uncertain 
term of a few years, his designs will be contracted 
into the same narrow span he imagines is to bound 
his existence. How can he exalt his thoughts to 
anything great and noble who only believes that 
after a short term on the stage of this world, he is to 
sink into oblivion and to lose his consciousness for 
ever ? ” 1 

Thus it is true that the belief in Immortality 
dignifies life as nothing else can dignify it. 

“ Life is real! Life is earnest ! 

And the grave is not its goal. 

1 Dust thou art, to dust returnest,’ 

Was not spoken of the soul.” 2 


1 Spectator , No. 210. 


Longfellow, A Psalm of Life. 



VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


157 


The assurance of Immortality is generally pro¬ 
portionate to the elevation of the personal life. As 
Dr. Martineau has said : “ The great essential to this 
belief is a sufficiently elevated estimate of human 
nature; no man will ever deny its Immortality who 
has a deep impression of its capacity for so great a 
destiny.” 1 

But conversely the belief in Immortality inspires 
great thoughts of the potency lying in the present 
life. He who is possessed with the thought of his 
own immortal being, and of that being especially as 
spiritual, will make it his aim, in the noble words of 
a pagan philosopher, “to live as far as possible an 
immortal life .” 2 

What then is the character of that life ? This is a 
question which will be more fully considered here¬ 
after. The Immortal Life must depend, as has been 
seen, upon the constitution of human nature. All 
the parts of human nature possess their own graces. 
But the graces of the body, though beautiful and 
splendid, are evidently transient. Long before the 
approach of death they are seen to decay. The 
soul, too, has its graces, partly intellectual, partly 

1 Five Points of Christian Faith, p. 19. 

2 i<p' 8 <rov ivd£x €Tai ddamrl^tv, Aristotle, Nicom. Eth. x. 7, 8. 


i5 8 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


emotional; and they too, the intellectual especially, 
tend to decay. For if the affection remains strong 
and vivid to life’s end, as often it will, yet memory, 
perception and resolution begin to fail. The 
spiritual experiences, on the other hand, grow more 
intense as life proceeds. The consciousness of 
God is never so clear as at life’s close. 

Thus the contemplation of the Immortal Life 
evokes the qualities which seem to possess in them¬ 
selves the secret of Immortality. He who hopes 
to live after death will even in this life practise the 
virtuous habits which do not seem to die. 

The habit or temper of worship , for instance, is 
suited to Immortality. Worship is Man’s preroga¬ 
tive. It exalts him above other terrestrial beings 
by prostrating him before the throne of the Supreme. 
No misjudgment of human nature can be so grievous 
as the imagination that it is exalted, if it loses the 
power of looking upwards. Man is never so low 
as when he thinks great thoughts of himself; he is 
never so high as when upon his knees he cries, “ I 
have sinned.” But humiliation, penitence, devotion, 
are essentially witnesses to the Unseen. In worship 
Man asserts his proper kinship with the superior 
beings whose immaculate existence finds its con- 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


*59 


summation in worship. It is thus that in the highest 
aspirations given to Man we adore the Supreme, 
saying, “With Angels and Archangels and all the 
company of heaven we laud and magnify Thy 
glorious Name ; evermore praising Thee and saying, 
Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, Heaven and 
earth are full of Thy glory; glory be to Thee, O 
Lord Most High.” 

Yet, again, the quality of love transcends the 
grave. St. Paul in a memorable passage has defined 
it. Yet it is often misunderstood, or but partly under¬ 
stood. Love which asks for love in return is but 
half love. Love in its nature is selfless ; it gives all, 
it asks for nothing. It is the most ethereal of the 
virtues. It is greater than faith, greater than hope. 
It is begun on earth ; it is perfected in Heaven. It 
cannot die. It forbids the thought of mortality. 
It is immortal as God is immortal. For it is His 
Spirit; it is Himself; for “God is love.” 

And akin to love, as a sign and earnest of the 
Immortal Life, is purity. But of this so much only 
may here be said, that to the believer in Immortality, 
i.e.y to one who believes in the spiritual and eternal 
nature of Man, it possesses a value which no mere 
secular system of morals can impart to it; for it is 


i6o THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

felt to be essentially an approximation of human 
nature to the Immortal and Divine. 

This is the religious faith in its highest form, not 
Christian faith only; for the most spiritually minded 
of pagan philosophers puts it thus: “It may well be 
that none but the pure may approach the pure.” 1 
And in so saying he does but anticipate the teaching 
given long ages afterwards by the most spiritual of 
Christian Apostles. “We know that when He shall 
appear we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him 
as He -is. And every man that hath this hope in 
him purifieth himself, even as He is pure.” 2 

This chapter has been persuasive and suggestive 
rather than didactic ; it has in a measure dealt with 
experiences unknown or hardly known, unless, 
perhaps, to devout and spiritual natures; but its 
conclusions may be summarised as follows : 

That the belief in Immortality, as interpreted by 
the enlightened conscience of Humanity, affords, 
and alone affords, an absolute moral sanction for 
all the critical sublime demands and duties of life. 

That it alone affords a complete infallible solace 
for all human sufferings, trials and disappointments. 

1 Plato, Phcedo , p. 67, B. \Pi\ KaOapy ydp Kadapov £(f>&TCTe<rdai p.T] ov 
depurbv 77. 2 1 John iii. 2, 3. 


VALUE OF THE BELIEF 


161 


That it promises a development and satisfaction of 
the graces, powers, and capacities which are felt to 
be circumscribed and sometimes defeated in the 
present life. 

That it exalts and ennobles the whole conception 
of human nature. 

That it guarantees the supreme virtues of Hu¬ 
manity, such as devotion, love, and purity, which 
are the points of contact between the Divine and 
human natures. 

And that, as so doing, it attests that Man is made 
in the image of God, and can shape himself accord¬ 
ing to his Divine Original. 

In Pascal’s words, then, “ II importe a toute la 
vie de savoir si l’ame est mortelle ou immortelle.” 1 


1 Pensees, ii. 18. 


CHAPTER IV 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 
A. External Evidences 

When the nature of the belief in the soul’s Immor¬ 
tality and the development and value of the belief 
have been ascertained, it is right to examine such 
evidences as are adducible either for or against the 
belief itself. For the naturalness or the utility or 
comfort of a belief is not in itself a proof that the 
belief is true. A belief may be natural, it may 
be suggested or confirmed by phenomena, it may 
possess a history, it may long have influenced and 
inspired human thought; and yet it may be so 
devoid of evidential support that, as soon as the 
light of truth is thrown upon it, it disappears and 
the world hears of it no more. This was the case 
(to take an obvious example) of the belief in the 
motion of the sun around the earth. No belief could 
162 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


163 


be more natural or credible, none possessed a longer 
history, none had been made the basis of a larger 
scientific system; and yet of no belief has the 
surrender been more complete. 

Is it, or ought it to be, with the belief in Immor¬ 
tality as it has been with the belief in the motion 
of the sun around the earth ? 

In default of evidence a belief so vital as that of 
Immortality cannot justly be regarded as a potent, 
still less as a paramount, motive of human conduct. 

But it has been laid down that in the field of 
Theology the evidences which it is fair or sufficient 
to demand are not such as establish a proof, but 
such as establish a probability. The probability may 
be higher or lower, more or less cogent; but it is all 
that is attainable, and while it remains, it rightly 
affects and determines action. In matters upon 
which certainty is impossible, i.e. f in the vast majority 
of human interests and speculations, if there are 
nineteen arguments on one side, and twenty argu¬ 
ments of equal validity on the other, it is the part 
of prudence to act in accordance with the more 
numerous arguments, even though the numerical 
superiority be but one. And the prudential rule is 
not less clear, but indeed clearer, when the action 


164 THE hope of immortality 

is not some particular isolated incident, which cannot 
largely or permanently affect our personal welfare, 
but the greatest of all human interests, viz., the con¬ 
duct of life. For in proportion as the issue is more 
serious, so is the duty and the importance of being 
on the safe side. 

Yet again, it is one thing to surrender a false 
belief, or a belief which has been shown to be 
possibly false, for a true belief; it is another thing 
to surrender it for a mere negation. Human nature 
is so constituted that the absence of belief exercises 
a paralysing effect in some matters upon the intel¬ 
lectual, and in others upon the spiritual, faculty 
of Man. As it is his privilege to inquire, so it is 
equally his privilege to believe; and bad as error 
is, indifference or suspense of judgment may be 
worse. Thus the doctrine of the sun’s motion itself 
was not upset merely by difficulty or disproof, it 
yielded to a more convincing doctrine. Men ceased 
to believe in the motion of the sun because they 
came to believe in the motion of the earth. It is 
not impossible that this belief may itself in its turn 
become merged in a larger generalisation. The 
law of the human intellect is that truer beliefs suc¬ 
ceed, as the ages pass, to less true beliefs. False- 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 165 

hood or error is supplanted by truth; it is not 
supplanted by negation. 

Now the Immortality of the soul, if it is not 
proved, is at least not disproved by Philosophy or 
Science. It seems in its nature to be incapable of 
disproof. For the life of the soul transcends human 
observation. We know not whence it comes or 
whither it goes. It may be said that there is little 
or nothing to show the survival of the soul after 
death. I do not admit that it is so, but it may be so 
said. At all events, there is nothing to show the 
dissolution of the soul in death. Death is still the 
great mystery, the great possibility. It still hides 
its secret; but no one has the right to assert or 
assume that that secret, when it is revealed, will be 
found to be nothingless. The experience of dis¬ 
covery has constantly revealed new and living 
wonders in the physical universe and in the micro¬ 
cosm which is called Man. Why should death 
prove the sole disappointment ? Why should it be 
assumed to be entirely dark and void ? 

This is the thought so beautifully suggested in 
Blanco White’s celebrated sonnet: 

“ Mysterious Night! When our first parent knew 
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name, 


i66 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, 

This glorious canopy of light and blue ? 

Yet ’neath a curtain of translucent dew, 

Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, 
Hesperus with the host of heaven came, 

And lo ! creation widened in Man’s view. 

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed 
Within thy beams, O Sun, or who could find 
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed, 

That to such countless orbs thou mad’st us blind? 
Why do we then shun death with anxious strife? 

If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life ? ” 


At the worst Man is entitled to cherish the hope, 
if not, indeed, the faith, of an Immortal Life. The 
arguments of the sceptical philosophers from Lucre¬ 
tius in the de Rerum Naturd — that extraordinary 
poetical and philosophical paradox — to Hume in 
his posthumous Essay on the Immortality of the Sold 
may be held (I do not say rightly) to diminish, 
in more or less degree, the probability of the soul’s 
immortal being. But they leave it a possibility, and 
not so only, but a possibility with all the riches of 
hope and longing that are centred in the unknown. 
Immortality remains the open field of speculative 
and religious aspiration. Where science pauses, 
thought and devotion enter within the open grave. 

But the disproof that Immortality can be dis- 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


167 


proved is not all that human nature expects. Even 
if it be granted, as it must be, that an Immortal Life 
remains, after all that can be said against it, a 
legitimate hope; even if it be granted, as it may be, 
that faith and piety are entitled to fill in the vacant 
spaces of such a hope with beliefs or vaticinations 
emanating from the conception of God, it is natural 
to ask not only why Immortality cannot justly be 
denied, but why it ought to be or may be embraced 
as a spiritual positive truth. The insufficiency of 
negative evidence does not make amends for the 
lack of such evidence as is positive or conclusive. 
He who would stake all upon the belief that life 
is immortal will desire to give a reason for the 
belief that is in him. 

What, then, in nature and substance are the 
evidences which may be adduced for a belief in 
the Immortality of the soul ? 

They would seem to be broadly distinguishable 
as of two kinds. One part of them may be called 
external, the other internal, evidences. It is neces¬ 
sary to exhibit the character of the two kinds. 

It is possible to argue for Immortality from such 
phenomena as lie outside the soul itself. Thus 
there may be, eg., considerations of the nature of 


i68 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


Man or of' the Nature of God, or, again, of the moral 
system and order of the Universe, which forbid 
or discourage the anticipation that the individual 
soul, after its association with the body, will be lost 
in nothingness. Indeed, it is difficult to frame any 
complete or consistent theory of the relation of 
God to *His Universe and to Man especially, as 
the highest known intellectual and moral being 
existent in it, without in some way speculating 
upon the future of Man and of that part of Man 
which is felt to be highest in him, viz., the spirit or 
soul. And the Universe is rich in analogies, which 
have been regarded, rightly or wrongly, as shedding 
light upon the probable destiny of Man. Such 
considerations are, as is clear, different in themselves 
and of different degrees of efficacy or validity; 
it is perhaps inevitable that they should be variously 
estimated by various minds; but the special note or 
character of all is that they depend upon some other 
evidence than a study of the soul itself. They are 
considerations drawn from without, not from within 
the soul. As being such, they are external evidences. 

But it is equally possible to argue for Immortality 
from a consideration of the soul as it is in itself. 
Thus if it should appear that the soul, considered 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF ^9 

in itself, exhibits such essential characteristics as 
necessarily preclude* or even have generally and 
legitimately been felt to preclude, the idea of 
dissolution or to render it exceedingly improbable, 
no argument for Immortality could well be more 
weighty or decisive than that. And if it should 
appear that these characteristics of the soul, although 
no one of them may be logically conclusive, yet are 
numerous and concordant and impressive, and tend 
with increasing persistency to one end, then there 
would be an accumulation of such reasonable 
assurances as may be held to justify, upon stronger 
logical grounds than before, a belief in the 
Immortality which awaits the human soul when 
emancipated by death. And these considerations 
are native to the soul itself ; they arise from a study 
of the soul apart from other existences ; they are 
independent of theories respecting God or Man or 
the Universe; they are, in a word, the internal evi¬ 
dences of Immortality. 

The present chapter will be concerned in the main 
with the external, the next with the internal evidences. 

It must be admitted that the evidences, whether of 
one kind or the other, are not all of equal or nearly 
equal value. But, as has been already said, it must 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


170 

not be assumed that the evidences of one kind are 
superior to those of the other, or that the strength 
of the evidences as a whole is that of the weakest 
link in the chain. In a cumulative chain of evidence 
it is the strongest rather than the weakest link which 
gives character to the whole. The combination and 
correlation of multiple arguments creates a validity 
which no single argument possesses. 

We will take first the evidences which have been 
called external. 

And here it is necessary at the outset to put aside 
the argument, as it is termed, from analogy. 

The strength of analogical argument is often 
misunderstood, especially in reference to such a 
doctrine as Immortality. 

Analogy is not proof, it is illustration. It does 
not create belief, but it recommends and enforces 
belief when already created. It depends for its 
validity upon the hypothesis, which may itself be 
the conclusion of a syllogism, that the phenomena 
between which analogy exists, or is taken as existing, 
are on the same plane, i.e., that they are or may be 
results of the same creative energy, and so are or 
may be expressions of the same Master Mind. 

The argument from analogy (though it is not 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


171 

strictly an argument) is seen to perfection in the 
parables of Our Lord. But His parables are not 
logical premisses from which a conclusion is derived. 
They are illustrations of the truth which He taught 
“as one having authority.” Our Lord never argued, 
He never used proof; He took for granted such 
primary articles of religion as the Being of God, 
Providential Care, the probationary character of 
this life, the eternity of the life beyond the grave. 
And these articles of religion He sought to recom¬ 
mend by illustrations drawn from the common 
natural world. The sowing of the seed, the 
ripening of the harvest, the wheat and the tares, 
the grain of mustard seed, the draw-net, the lost 
sheep on the mountains — these and other stories 
like these are not demonstrations of novel and 
difficult truths; they are analogies or illustrations, 
and their influence upon the minds of millions of 
men has been the more powerful, as illustration 
comes home to men’s consciences with a stronger 
and more impressive force than argument. To 
treat the analogy as an argument is to expose it to 
the shafts of acute criticism. It is to mistake the 
spires and pinnacles of belief for its foundations. 
For the force of an analogy in spiritual things 


172 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


is simply this : That if the same God is the Author 
of the natural and the spiritual worlds, it is not im¬ 
probable, but may rather be expected, that a certain 
likeness — a certain conformity—should be observ¬ 
able in the phenomena of both worlds. 

It would be wrong, then, to exaggerate the 
importance of the argument from analogy as an 
evidence of the soul’s Immortality. Instances 
such as the emergence of the butterfly from the 
chrysalis, or the ripening of the grain from the 
buried seed, or the revival of the tree in the spring- 
tide after its seeming death in winter, are valu¬ 
able, not so much as arguments, but as illustrations; 
they are designed as the supports of a be¬ 
lief already held on other grounds. The utmost 
that such illustrations can do is to remove 
what may have been felt as an a priori improba¬ 
bility ; and this they may do, although the 
illustration is not exact or precise, but is, as every 
analogy must be, at the best only approximate to 
the truth which it is taken to exemplify. But the 
more convincingly it is brought home to thoughtful 
minds that all phenomena of life and nature are parts 
of one plan, the greater will be the readiness to 
admit the possibility and even the probability of 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


173 


developements of the soul beyond the narrow limits 
of space and time. 

As the value of analogy in religious speculation is 
now in question, it will be well to consider the 
famous chapter — the 15th of the First Epistle to the 
Corinthians — in which St. Paul is believed to argue 
for the resurrection of the human body. So many 
tender and sacred associations cling to this chapter, 
that its logical importance has been often misunder¬ 
stood. It has been called an incontrovertible proof 
of the resurrection of the body. But if it be treated 
as proof, it may easily be controverted. Why (it 
may be said) should the existence of different orders 
of created beings such as men and animals and 
birds and fishes, or of celestial luminaries differing 
in splendour as the sun and moon and stars, why 
should even the germination of the corn that springs 
from the bare grain constitute a proof that the 
human body, when laid in the tomb, will spon¬ 
taneously emerge not into life only, but into a life 
far more glorious and sublime than the life of earth ? 

As an argument, if such it were meant to be, the 
chapter would fail; as an analogy it is suggestive 
and inspiring. The thought underlying St. Paul’s 
words is that Nature as the expression of Divine Intel- 


174 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


ligence exhibits everywhere a rich and progressive 
variety. In other words, it is that everywhere the 
distinction between the lower forms of life and the 
higher, and the passing of the lower into the higher, 
are the laws which operate in the Universe. He who 
denies, then, the resurrection, or, as St. Paul would 
rather call it, the glorification of the human body, 
sets an arbitrary limit to Omnipotence in the sphere 
in which Omnipotent Energy may be naturally 
expected to work with the highest result. And 
when the variety of form or splendour is admitted as 
a possibility, then analogies serve to illustrate what 
it may be or how it may take effect. Thus the con¬ 
trast of the buried seed and the living grain is not a 
proof that the body which is laid in the tomb will 
rise to new life ; but it is a suggestion that the new life 
may be a reality, and that, when it is realised, it may 
be infinitely more glorious than the old. In an 
argument from analogy all depends upon the point 
of view. To the darkened and confined vision of 
paganism, as is seen in the pathetic lines of 
Moschus, the new birth of the flowers in the spring- 
tide suggested no hope for Man, but only a deeper 
despair; so far worse was his destiny than theirs. 

“ Ah me, when the mallows wither in the garden 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


*75 


and the green parsley and the curled tendrils of the 
anise, on a later day they live again and spring in 
another year; but we men, we, the great and mighty 
or wise, when once we have died, in hollow earth 
we sleep, gone down into silence; a right long and 
endless and unawakening sleep.” 1 

But to St. Paul’s eye all Nature was eloquent of 
faith in the high immortal destiny of Man. “ So 
also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in 
corruption; it is raised in incorruption : it is sown in 
dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weak¬ 
ness ; it is raised in power: it is sown a natural 
body ; it is raised a spiritual body.” 2 “The body of 
our humiliation,” “the body of Christ’s glory,” are, 
as it were, the poles of Man’s corporeal destiny. 
The one is ours now ; the other (in St. Paul’s view) 
shall be ours hereafter. And “the body of His 
glory ” is as much superior to “ the body of our 
humiliation,” as is the golden corn in the harvest- 
field to the bare grain cast into the earth, or the sun 

1 al, Al, ral paXAxo-<- ptv ixap Kara kAttov 6\u)vtcu. 
i) ra x^upa ciXipa t6 t' eidaXts odXop AvJ]Qov 
varepop ad {(bovri Kal els eros AXXo (/>vovti’ 

Appes 5’ oi peyAXoi Kal Kaprepol 7] <ro<f>oi ApSpes 
oxirdre xpara ddpup.es, ApAkooi ip xO° VL koiX$ 
evSopes ed paXa paKpbp areppopa p^yperop vxpop. 

2 i Corinthians xv. 42-44. (The Translation is Lang’s.) 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


17 6 

shining in his might to the most distant asteroid, or 
Man himself, the lord of creation, to the lowest 
animal. 

Such is St. Paul’s analogy, used to express the 
nature of the spiritual body. The analogies used in 
support of the Immortal Life are similar to it. They 
depend upon a belief in God as the Omnipotent 
Author of the world, whether temporal or moral or 
spiritual. Apart from that belief they claim no 
significance. But when that belief is granted, it 
renders a man’s view of the Universe penetrating 
and spiritualising, so that he sees “ more things in 
heaven and earth ” than philosophy dreams of. 

From the analogical teaching of our Lord and of 
St. Paul we may pass by a natural descent to Bishop 
Butler’s celebrated work: The Analogy of Natural 
and Revealed Religion to the Constitution and Course 
of Nature. The Analogy must be read as it is. It 
must not be taken as a general defence of religion. 
It postulates the highest of all beliefs, the belief in 
God. It elaborates a comparison between religion, 
whether natural or revealed, on the one hand, and 
the phenomena of Nature on the other; but the 
comparison possesses no evidential value except 
upon the hypothesis that the phenomena of Nature 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


1 77 


represent the thought of a single Supreme Intel¬ 
ligence. 

To treat the Analogy otherwise is to deal unfairly 
with it. Pitt is credited with the saying that it started 
more difficulties than it solved. As an argument, 
standing by itself, it may well create difficulties. But 
as an exposition of certain facts addressed to persons 
who accepted and asserted a particular theory of cer¬ 
tain other facts, it holds a permanent place in theo¬ 
logical controversy. It must be studied in relation 
to the deistical controversy of Bishop Butler’s day. 
He himself states in the Preface what was its pur¬ 
pose, and it is strange that that purpose should have 
been misconceived. 

With the strictly controversial side of the Analogy 
we are not here concerned. We shall see presently 
how it bears upon the great doctrine supported in 
this Essay. All that is necessary here is to empha¬ 
sise the nature of the argument which Bishop Butler 
urges as analogical, viz., that where two sets or 
bodies of phenomena are severally regarded as 
expressions of the same Will, the characteristics 
which are admitted to occur in the one may be rea¬ 
sonably expected to occur in the other. And con¬ 
versely that, where two sets of phenomena exhibit 

N 


i 7 » 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


the same or similar characteristics, they may be 
reasonably referred to the same Will. And what is 
true of Bishop Butler’s great Analogy is true of all 
analogies upon religion. It is when a truth has 
been already rendered probable or not improbable 
that analogy corroborates and confirms it. 

It would seem, however, that writers upon Immor¬ 
tality have sometimes done their cause an injury by 
the stress they have laid upon necessarily inadequate 
analogical examples of a life transcending and trans¬ 
forming apparent death. They have cited the 
revivals or resurrections of Nature as affording 
evidence of a life after death ; and when it has been 
shown that there is no such thing in Nature as a 
resurrection of the dead, when it has been shown 
that the seed, though buried, is not dead, and, not 
being dead, does not come to life again, the evidence 
in which they put their trust sinks under their feet. 
It is a different matter when the resurrections of 
Nature are treated as figurative; for then, however 
critically they may be scrutinised, they remain as 
figures, and their spiritual significance is unimpaired. 

The analogies of Nature, then—the serpent, the 
butterfly upon Egyptian tombs, the seed of corn, the 
spring after winter — find their true place in a discus- 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


179 


sion of Immortality, not as establishing it as a truth, 
but as illustrating and enforcing it when it has been 
brought by argument into the region of probability. 
They are not proofs, but in a sense they are stronger 
or more persuasive than any proofs; for simile or 
analogy has a strange force in the world, and the 
minds of men lie naturally disposed to welcome the 
hypothesis of a great formative and comprehensive 
Providence. 

But it is time to treat of the external evidences (as 
I have ventured to call them) for the doctrine of 
Immortality. 

These evidences, if I do not mistake them, are 
threefold; not indeed that they can be absolutely 
distinguished, but that it is practically convenient 
so to distinguish them. 

They lie severally in the constitution of the Uni¬ 
verse, in the nature of Man, and in the Being of God. 

From each of these three principles converging 
lights are shed upon the destiny of the soul. The 
lights are partial and imperfect, but they are not 
insufficient as evidences. 

I propose to take them in order. 

I. Evidence from the constitution of the Universe. 
The Immortality of the soul may be a philosophical 


iSo THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

or scientific as well as a religious doctrine. Although 
it has been adopted, as it were, by religion and 
enriched and ennobled by the wealth of religious 
sentiment and emotion, yet it may be, and sometimes 
has been, the result of intellectual speculation upon 
the phenomena of the natural world. The ancient 
thinkers who believed the doctrine of Immortality 
held it as an article not of religion but of philosophy. 
For in fact philosophy was the religion of Greece 
and Rome. The philosophers were the priests. The 
ministers of religion were mere hierophants; they 
were occupied in performing stated ceremonies ; they 
chanted litanies, offered sacrifices and interpreted 
auguries; it was not their office (unless in the 
Eleusinian or other mysteries) to illumine the 
darkness of human conduct and human destiny. 
The divorce between religion and belief or conduct 
was complete. Cicero, in his De Officiis , a treatise 
upon the moral conduct of life, appeals to many 
motives and disciplines but hardly at all to religion. 
The only teachers of religion were the philosophers. 
There is a curious passage of Dio Chrysostom in 
which he says that, if a person were in anxiety or 
distress, he would send for a philosopher to give him 
comfort. 1 


1 Dio Chrysostom, Orat. xxvii., p. 529. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF j8i 

It is in philosophy, then, that Greek thought ex¬ 
hibits its first signs of longing for arguments on 
behalf of Immortality. Philosophy laid the founda¬ 
tion of the great belief which religion has appro¬ 
priated as its own. 

It is impossible within the limits of this essay to 
summarise the reasonings of the Greek philosophers 
upon the destiny of the soul. But it is needless; for 
a single treatise — the Phcedo of Plato — denotes the 
high-water mark of Greek religious philosophy. 
Whatever Greek imagination or reflexion could 
teach about the soul is found there. 

The modern student of the Phcedo is more deeply 
impressed by the strength of the belief to which it 
testifies than by the arguments underlying and sup¬ 
porting that belief. The serene confidence of 
Socrates in the presence of death is more cogent 
than any logical process. For the Phcedo is argu¬ 
ment touched with poetry and beautified by 
sanctity; and intellectual criticism falls to the 
ground at the spectacle of the philosopher spend¬ 
ing his last hours, with his sorrowing friends 
gathered around him and the young disciple whom 
he loved sitting at his feet, in speculating upon the 
future of his soul in that unknown world for which 


182 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


•his whole life had, as he deemed, been a preparation, 
and to which he would pass at the setting of the sun. 

But the philosophical arguments of the Phcedo 
deserve to be considered in the light of modern 
discovery. Socrates or Plato, like Lucretius, was 
gifted with the faculty of anticipating (if only 
by a suggestive intimation) the theories of an age 
far later than his own. In the Phcedo he goes 
beyond intimations; he developes a theory of the 
Universe. The late Master of Balliol says with 
justice that his reasoning, if it be interpreted with 
a sense of true historical perspective, is the reason¬ 
ing of philosophers to-day. Thus the argument 
drawn in the Phcedo from the cycle of existence is 
a counterpart to the modern argument of the con¬ 
servation of energy. Socrates asserts as a scientific 
principle that “opposites are generated out of their 
opposites,” taking as examples of opposites not only 
relative terms like “greater” and “less,” “stronger” 
and “ weaker,” “ better ” and “ worse,” but such pro¬ 
cesses as growing hot and cold, waking and sleep¬ 
ing ; he argues that each one of these opposites 
passes into the other, the greater, e.g., becoming 
the less and the less the greater, that which is awake 
falling asleep and that which is asleep awaking, and 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 183 

so on ; this transition, then, is a law of Nature and, 
as it is evident that the living die, it is a proper 
inference that the dead return to life. And so “ we 
arrive at the conclusion that the living come from 
the dead, just as the dead come from the living; 
and this, if true, affords a most certain proof that 
the souls of the dead exist in some place out of 
which they come again.” 1 

Socrates holds, then, that all existence moves in a 
cycle, from life to death and then again from death to 
life. He contends, too, that this movement is eternal; 
it is ceaseless change, it is never destruction. Thus 
the Immortality of the soul is a supreme instance of 
a law universal in Nature. As day succeeds to night, 
and motion to rest, so life is the sequel of death. 

It must be admitted that Socrates gives no ade¬ 
quate proof of the cyclical movement upon which 
he bases his belief in the soul’s Immortality; it is 
in part a poetical fancy, in part a scientific generali¬ 
sation, in part a mere playing with words. But it 
is a witness to the philosophical difficulty of believ¬ 
ing that whatever has come into being can be lost. 
And that this is his meaning is clear; for he adds 
that, unless the process of mutual generation were 
1 Phcedo , p. 72 A. 


184 THE hope of immortality 

to take place, all things would ultimately be reduced 
to a stagnant uniformity. 

This is not the sole Socratic argument for Im¬ 
mortality, but it is the only one which may be said 
to fall under the constitution of the Universe. 

In modern thought the doctrine of the cycle dis¬ 
appears ; it is replaced by the doctrine of continuity. 
All force, as all matter, is perpetual. The law 
of conservation holds good throughout Nature. 
“There is no such thing,” it has been said, “as 
annihilation. Things are changed, transformations 
abound, but essences do not cease to be.” 1 

The natural expectation of the soul’s Immortality 
may be put in these words: — 

Human nature (it may be said) consists of two 
parts, body and soul; these two parts are the 
constituent elements of human nature; they are 
evidently separated in death. But the fate of the 
body, after this separation, is ascertained: it is 
dissolved but not destroyed, it undergoes certain 
chemical and physical changes, but it does not 
cease to be ; and if it be so, the inference is that 
the soul is not destroyed at death, but experiences 
a change similar perhaps to that of the body or 

1 Alger, A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, p. 42. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF ^5 

different from it, but at all events a change which 
leaves it still and always an entity. 

All that is now urged is that the law of conserva¬ 
tion holds good, as in the body, so in the soul. Some 
philosophers have made a distinction between body 
and soul in respect of their liability, not indeed to 
destruction, but to dissolution. Thus Clarke, in 
replying to Dodswell, used this language: “As 
evidently as the known properties of matter prove 
it to be certainly a discerpible substance, whatever 
other unknown properties it may be endued with, 
so evidently the known and confessed properties of 
immaterial beings prove them to be indiscerpible, 
whatever unknown properties they may be endued 
with.” 1 And no doubt, whether Clark’s view be 
accepted or not, it would be a mistake to press 
the parallelism of soul and body in respect of 
their future destiny beyond due limit; for there 
is as yet nothing to suggest that the soul, if it 
survives the event of death, will, like the body, 
experience dissolution. 

It will, however, be time to consider the probable 
fate of the soul when we come to examine the 

1 A letter to Mr. Dodswell, p. 101, quoted by Mr. Gladstone in 
the North American Review for January, 1896, p. 6. 


i86 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


evidence for Immortality which lies in the nature 
of the soul itself. If Clarke’s view be just, it con¬ 
stitutes an argument a fortiori. For if the soul 
differs from the body, in that it is immaterial and 
therefore indiscerpible (to use Clarke’s word), and if 
the body, although being discerpible, is not destroyed 
or destructible in death, it is abundantly clear that 
destruction is not and cannot be the destiny of the 
soul itself in death. 

But the argument derivable from the constitution 
of the Universe holds good, whatever view be taken 
of the soul. It is that nothing is destroyed ; everything 
is changed, but nothing destroyed ; and therefore 
the soul survives the great change known as death. 

That this argument, taken by itself, constitutes a 
probability of the soul’s permanent being, it is, in my 
opinion, difficult, if not indeed impossible, to doubt. 
That probability, like others relating to the soul, is 
no doubt affected and strengthened by the belief in 
God. But, even apart from such belief, annihilation 
is so strongly opposed to the apparent and ascer¬ 
tained laws of the universe that it is certainly more 
difficult of acceptance on scientific grounds than 
any theory of the soul’s Immortality. 

• What are the conditions of the soul’s surviving 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


187 


existence is a question which will come under review 
in the last chapter. Natural Religion may suggest 
the fact of Immortality; but it does not, except 
within narrow limits, suggest its conditions. If upon 
these any authoritative voice is heard in the world, 
it can be no other than the voice of Revelation. 

But Natural Religion, which is only another name 
for devout Philosophy, recommends, if it does not 
enforce, a belief in the soul’s Immortality. For 
without any question of spiritual continuity or 
developement, or reward and punishment, or the 
laws of immaterial being, Natural Religion justly 
asks how it is scientific or philosophical or legitimate 
in speculation to assume as certain or even as 
probable that the principle of conservation, which 
is universal as the Universe itself, should fail, when 
there is no proof whatever of its failing, in the life 
of the individual human soul. 

This is the argument for Immortality from the 
constitution of the Universe. 

But the argument lies open to certain difficulties 
which it would not be reasonable to ignore. 

And of these the most interesting, as it is the 
most important, is the question of the bearing of 
such evidence as the constitution of the Universe 


i88 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


affords for the Immortality of individual human 
souls upon the probable future destiny of the lower 
animals. 

To some minds it will seem that an argument for 
Immortality loses dignity or importance if it applies 
to the lower animals as cogently as to Man; to 
others it will seem that such an argument as the 
law of conservation necessarily embraces all forms 
of energy or vitality. 

But it is impossible to reflect upon Immortality, 
especially as attested by a law of the Universe, with¬ 
out inquiring, Is it probable in the light of the 
considerations adduced for human Immortality that 
the souls of the lower animals, if they possess souls, 
are capable of an immortal existence like the souls 
of men ? or in other words, Is it reasonable to 
believe, and does the constitution of the Universe 
recommend the belief, that, whatever be the fate of 
human beings after death, the same or similar will 
be or may be the fate of the animals ? 

Nobody who has pondered the probabilities of 
Immortality will offer a reply to this question with¬ 
out a feeling of diffident humility. 

The possible Immortality of the lower animals is 
not a speculation that can be put aside as unphilo- 



EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


89 


sophical. It is true that human thought, oscillating, 
as its habit is, between extremes, has tended at one 
time to disparage, and at another to exaggerate, the 
similarities of the human and the lower animal 
natures. The philosophical school of which Descartes 
was the head looked upon the animals as mere 
machines or automata. But Descartes, it seems, 
was led to take this view of the animals just because 
he denied that animals could have souls. Con¬ 
sidering the soul to be an entity independent of the 
body, though temporarily allied to it, and consider¬ 
ing animals to possess no soul, he could only classify 
them with mechanical instruments. But that has 
not been the view of some of the most profound 
among the thinkers whether in ancient or in modern 
times, nor does it seem to be the view which naturally 
arises in the human mind, when the doctrine of 
Immortality is first conceived as a positive truth. 

Most people are familiar with Pope’s lines : 

“ Lo ! the poor Indian whose untutored mind 
Sees God in clouds and hears Him in the wind. 

To be contents his natural desire; 

He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire, 

But thinks admitted to that equal sky 
His faithful dog shall bear him company.” 1 


Essay on Man , i. 99 sqq. 



190 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


But it is not always recognised that this is held 
by anthropologists to be the natural presumption or 
intuition of the human mind. Immortality, wher¬ 
ever it is believed among primitive men, is nowhere 
and never looked upon as a distinction between 
Man and the lower animals. Savages generally 
believe that the spirit or soul survives the grave; 
but they believe it of all spirits and souls, not of 
human souls only; they do not conceive that the 
souls of men should be endowed with a futurity, 
and the souls of the other animals should not. 
“ The sense of an absolute psychical distinction 
between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilised 
world, is hardly to be found among the lower 
races.” 1 

As sometimes happens in religious philosophy, the 
thought of cultivated and enlightened men even in a 
late age has visibly tended in this special instance 
to coincide with the intuition of primitive mankind. 
No doubt it may be alleged that it was the poverty 
of the conception of the soul even in human beings 
which led the savage, and it is the dignity of that 
conception even in the animals which leads the 
philosopher, to postulate or anticipate for both the 

1 Tylor, Primitive Culture , vol. i., p. 469. 


EVIDENCES FOE THE BELIEF 


191 

same destiny. But, whatever the cause may be, 
the fact remains. Let me refer to two passages 
chosen from master-thinkers, one of the old classical, 
the other of the modern Christian world. 

The Republic of Plato ends with the story of Er, 
the son of Armenius, who, twelve days after that 
he was believed to have been slain in battle, came 
to life again upon the funeral pyre and related what 
he had seen in the world below. He told how the 
souls of men and women after purification were per¬ 
mitted to make choice of new lives, “and not only 
did men pass into animals, but I must also mention 
(he said) that there were animals tame and wild who 
changed into one another and into corresponding 
human natures — the good into the gentle and the 
evil into the savage, in all sorts of combinations.” 1 

Bishop Butler, in the chapter of the Analogy 
which relates to the future life, was led to consider 
the probable destiny of the lower animals. And 
although he expresses himself with reserve, still the 
fact that he replies to objections alleged against 
their Immortality is an evidence of his mental 
inclination ; for he concludes that “ all difficulties 
as to the manner how they are to be disposed of 


1 Book x., p. 620 D. 


I 9 2 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


are so apparently and wholly founded on our 
ignorance, that it is wonderful they should be 
insisted upon by any but such as are weak enough 
to think they are acquainted with the whole system 
of things.” 1 

The names of Plato and Butler stand upon the 
high mountain-chain of human thought. It were 
easy to add to them other names, such as those of 
Leibnitz or Coleridge or Agassiz; for all these 
thinkers and others like them have advocated, 
though on different grounds and by different 
reasonings, the Immortality of all living creatures. 
Nor can it be urged that it is a doctrine which has 
been ever felt to be prohibited by the Christian 
Revelation. Mr. Wesley, in his famous sermon 2 
on the 8th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, 
after describing the suffering and humiliation of the 
animals, uses these words : “ Will ‘ the creature ’ — 
will even the brute creation always remain in this 
deplorable condition ? God forbid that we should 
affirm this; yea, or even entertain such a thought! 
While ‘the whole creation groaneth together’ 
(whether men attend or not), their groans are not 

1 Part i., chap. i. 

2 Sermon lx. The whole sermon is wonderfully interesting and 
instructive. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


93 


dispersed in idle air, but enter into the ears of Him 
that made them. While His creatures ‘travail 
together in pain,’ He knoweth all their pain, and is 
bringing them nearer and nearer to the birth, which 
shall be accomplished in its season. He seeth ‘the 
earnest expectation ’ wherewith the whole animated 
creation waiteth for that final ‘manifestation of the 
sons of God,’ in which ‘they themselves also shall 
be delivered ’ (not by annihilation, annihilation is 
not deliverance) from the present ‘ bondage of 
corruption ’ into a measure of ‘ the glorious liberty 
of the children of God.’ 

“Nothing can be more express — away with vulgar 
prejudices, and let the plain word of God take 
place. They ‘shall be delivered from the bondage 
of corruption into glorious liberty ’— even a measure 
according as they are capable — of the ‘ liberty of the 
children of God.’ 

“To descend to a few particulars. The whole 
brute creation will then, undoubtedly, be restored 
not only to the vigour, strength and swiftness 
which they had at their creation, but to a far higher 
degree of each than they ever enjoyed. They will 
be restored, not only to that measure of under¬ 
standing which they had in Paradise, but to a 


194 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


degree of it as much higher than that as the under¬ 
standing of an elephant is beyond that of a worm. 
And whatever affections they had in the garden of 
God, will be restored with vast increase, being 
exalted and refined in a manner which we ourselves 
are now not able to comprehend. The liberty they 
then had will be completely restored, and they will 
be free in all their motions. They will be delivered 
from all irregular appetites, from all unruly passions, 
from every disposition that is either evil in itself, or 
has any tendency to evil. No rage will be found 
in any creature, no fierceness, no cruelty, or thirst 
for blood. So far from it, that ‘ the wolf shall dwell 
with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the 
kid, the calf and the young lion together; and a 
little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear 
shall feed together; and the lion shall eat straw like 
the ox. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my 
holy mountain.’ ” 

It may be interesting to ask what has been the 
influence of modern scientific theory upon Man’s 
view of his relation to the lower animals. 

In one conspicuous respect it has intensified the 
sense of kinship or affinity between them. For 
the Darwinian theory, which is now accepted in 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


195 


some form or other by all scientific thinkers as the 
most reasonable account of physiological facts, 
insists that Man, in his corporeal nature, is, if not 
descended from, yet intimately connected with, 
some lower form of animal life. This speculation 
has not, I think, produced as strong an effect as 
might have been anticipated in the quickening of 
human sympathy among Darwinians for the suffer¬ 
ings and disabilities of the animals. Nor again has 
it strengthened scientific belief in the future psychical 
or spiritual existence of the animals; it has rather 
impaired belief in the capacity of Man for such an 
existence. Darwin indeed spoke with his usual 
caution of his theory as affecting the probable fate 
of human souls. “ Few persons,” he says, “feel any 
anxiety from the impossibility of determining at 
what precise period in the developement of the 
individual, from the first trace of a minute germinal 
vesicle, man becomes an immortal being, and there 
is no greater cause for anxiety because the period 
cannot possibly be determined in the gradually 
ascending organic scale.” 1 

But some of his disciples have been less scrupu¬ 
lous than their master. Thus Carl Vogt has not 

1 Descent of Man , part iii., chap, xxi., p. 613. 


196 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


hesitated to declare that “ physiology pronounces 
definitely and categorically against the idea of 
individual Immortality, as indeed against all notions 
founded upon that of the independent existence of 
the soul.” 1 He refers not to the souls of the lower 
animals alone, but to Man’s soul. Such is the 
dogmatism which was once regarded as theological, 
but has descended from Theology to Science. 

Yet while some scientific writers in the name of 
Darwinism have insisted with a passionate earnest¬ 
ness upon the absolutely materialistic and positive 
conception of human or animal nature, there have 
been thinkers of higher tone and deeper insight who 
have keenly realised that no revelation of modern 
Science has destroyed or diminished the mystery 
attaching to the nature and destiny of the lower beings 
by which Man is surrounded and aided or harassed 
in his daily life. Cardinal Newman, for instance, has 
spoken of the lower animals as being in their nature 
and their destiny not less incomprehensible to Man’s 
present intellectual insight than the very angels of 
whom Holy Scripture tells. And there are not a 
few Christians beside him who have sought to 
justify the proximity of the animals to mankind by 

1 Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, vol. ii., p. 332. 


EVIDENCES FOE THE BELIEF 


197 


dignifying their character both in this life and after it. 

The question remains, then, Are these mysterious 
beings mortal or immortal ? We know so little of 
their life here; have they another life ? And is it 
such as ours will be? They are like us, and yet 
unlike; near us, yet infinitely far; a pathos, as of 
defeat or failure, rests on their lives; what is to be 
said or imagined about their destiny ? 

This, at least, is sure, that neither Science nor 
Religion sets a bar to the belief or the hope 
of their Immortality. Nay, if the Immortality 
of the human soul is once admitted, it seems to 
follow that, in proportion as the lower animals are 
assimilated to Man in their physical or intellectual 
or moral nature, the probability of their sharing 
Man’s Immortality, though under certain limiting 
conditions, is increased. 

Christian Theology, it must be admitted, has been 
occupied too exclusively with the influence of 
Redemption upon Humanity. The truer view is 
that, as all creation, i.e., every created thing, was 
mysteriously implicated in Man’s Fall, so all creation 
is participant in his Redemption. St. Paul in many 
passages of his Epistles, but especially in the 8th 
chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, conceives not 


i 9 8 the hope of immortality 

of Humanity alone, but of all creation as regenerated 
by the Incarnation of the Son of God. “ The 
creature was made subject to vanity . . . the crea¬ 
ture itself shall be delivered from the bondage of 
corruption into the glorious liberty of the children 
of God.” 

In the light of this conception it would seem 
natural that Immortality should be the prerogative 
of the lower animals as well as of Man, but that the 
Immortality of the lower animals should be con¬ 
ditioned by the limitations (whatever they may be) 
of their own nature. The lower animals, as being 
akin to Man, will inherit, like Man, an Immortality; 
but in so far as their nature may be said to fall 
below his, their Immortality will be less august and 
perfect than his. 

If it is necessary then to put forth any hypothesis 
as to the future life of the lower animals, it is 
necessary to examine the constituent elements of 
human and of animal nature. 

A spiritual Immortality cannot be the lot of such 
beings as are other than spiritual. 

In the first chapter of this essay it was shown 
that human nature is composed of three parts or 
elements, viz., body, mind or soul, and spirit. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


199 


How far do these three elements appear in the 
lower animals ? 

The body (aoifia) Man shares with all created 
things. It is a part of plants as much as of 
animals, of the lower animals as much as of Man. 
It is dissolved at death; it is not essentially the 
heir of Immortality. Whether the Christian Revela¬ 
tion throws any light, and if so what is the light 
thus thrown, upon the future of the human body it 
will be time to consider hereafter. I am dealing 
now with such arguments only as are indepen¬ 
dent of any positive revelation. But the yjrvxv> i.e. t 
the emotional and intellectual part of human 
nature which is properly to be called the “ soul ” 
as distinct from the “spirit,” the lower animals 
share with Man, only not completely, but in a cer¬ 
tain limited or conditional degree. That is to say, 
the emotional desires and the intellectual activities 
of the lower animals are not dissimilar to the human 
but inferior. It is self-evident that the lower animals 
are naturally incapable of the keen delights and pains 
awakened in Man by memory, hope, beauty, wonder, 
disappointment, enthusiasm, as they are incapable 
of the intellectual achievements which have laid the 
physical Universe open to his understanding. There 


200 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


is a third part of human nature, viz., the irvev^a, or 
spirit, by which Man, as has been said, attains to 
the knowledge of God; and of this, although it is 
the supreme human faculty, the lower animals in 
their nature are devoid. 

Assuming then, as has been argued in the first 
chapter, that the Immortality which is commonly 
called an Immortality of the soul ought in strict 
accuracy to be taken as an Immortality of the 
Trvevfia and the i.e. } of the spiritual, intel¬ 

lectual and emotional parts of human nature, it 
would seem to follow that we are justified in 
believing the lower animals to survive their physical 
death, but to survive it in a condition of limited, 
although possibly progressive, intellectual and 
emotional capacity, but without any developement 
of the spiritual faculty by which Man knows God. 
The Immortality of the lower animals, if so regarded, 
is not the same as Man’s; it lacks the special deter¬ 
mining character of Man’s Immortality; and the 
conclusions at which it is possible to arrive respect¬ 
ing human destiny do not, except partially and inci¬ 
dentally, relate to the destiny of the lower animals. 
For as spirit (7 rvev/ia) is higher than soul ), so is 

Man’s future higher than that of the lower animals. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


201 


It is the Immortality of Man which is the sub¬ 
ject of this essay. And in Man it is not the 
or soul only, nor even the although invested 

and enriched with all such prerogatives as establish 
the intellectual superiority of Man to the lower 
animals, but primarily and essentially the irvev^a or 
spiritual faculty which is the inheritor and recipient 
of Immortality. And hence it is, as will be more 
fully set forth afterwards, that the revelations of the 
unseen world generally represent Man as spending 
himself, as a spiritual being, in acts of worship; for 
no sooner is his spirit emancipated by death from 
the embarrassments and obscurations of the flesh 
than it expands and expatiates in devotion, as 
enjoying at last an unimpeded vision of God, 
contemplating His excellency with inextinguishable 
delight and losing all taint of earthly infirmity in 
the perfectness of adoration and love. 

Still the considerations adduced for Man’s Im¬ 
mortality from the apparent law of conservation in 
the Universe must be held to support, though with 
inferior emphasis, the Immortality of all living 
creatures. 

But it is time to consider certain speculative 
difficulties affecting human Immortality itself. 


202 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


The Eternal or Immortal Life, whatever its nature 
may be, is confessedly invisible. It is not a life that 
is subject to the sight or sense or perception. And 
there are minds which experience a difficulty in 
realising an invisible and intangible existence. I do 
not say that the difficulty is felt by such minds as 
have received a philosophical training; but a good 
many minds of men are not philosophical. 

It is not, however, a strong or serious difficulty. 
There is no possibility of supposing, even after 
brief reflexion, that such phenomena as are cognis¬ 
able by the senses are coextensive and coincident 
with the Universe of created things. If it were so, 
it would be irrational to believe in God. “No man 
hath seen God at any time.” It would be irrational to 
believe in the world of angels or spirits. To believe 
in such a world is to believe (at least) in the possi¬ 
bility of a personal life invisible and yet immortal. 

These are theological considerations, and their 
gravity is dependent upon a certain religious and 
even Christian attitude of mind, but apart from 
Christianity, apart from all religion, it is perspicuous 
that human senses are limited to a certain range, 
and beyond that range there is much that exists 
and operates, although it lacks the certificate of 
sensual testimony. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


203 


I am arguing now that the invisibility or imper- 
ceptibility of the spiritual and Immortal Life is no 
sufficient reason for disbelieving in it, if it be 
recommended to belief on reasonable grounds. 

The senses of Man are but partial witnesses to 
truth. They are the instruments available for 
registering phenomena within a certain range or 
area, but not beyond it. That they do not register 
other phenomena is no proof that those phenomena 
do not exist; it is not even a proof that they cannot 
be known. 

It is enough for my purpose to show the limita¬ 
tion of the senses; I do not now consider how it 
may be modified or corrected. Let me take two or 
three instances of this limitation. 

The telescopic camera photographs innumerable 
worlds, but of these many are invisible to the 
human eye. The magnetic needle responds to 
impulsive forces which lie beyond the perceptivity 
of the most delicate and sensitive human nerves. 
Let there be less than thirty or more than four 
thousand vibrations of matter in a second, and the 
human ear is impotent to discern a tone. The seven 
colours of the rainbow fall within the perceptive 
power of human eyes; but all that lies beyond the 


204 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


violet is darkness. Is it to be imagined that there 
exist no tones or colours of which other beings than 
Man in other worlds by other faculties than ours 
might take cognisance ? 

The atomic theory is the basis of modern physics ; 
but what is an atom ? Who has seen it or can 
define it ? The ethereal medium is a necessary 
postulate of the theory of light, but what positive 
proof of the ether exists ? And to speak again of 
the animals, whose nature throws so much light not 
upon the dignity alone but upon the poverty of 
human endowments, it is probable that the mystery 
of animal life—so striking when it is pointed out, 
yet so often forgotten — is best interpreted (so far as 
it can be known at all) by the hypothesis that the 
lower animals see sights and hear sounds, and in 
general are capable of perceptions, which transcend 
the scope and capacity of human faculties. 

Such considerations as these ally themselves to 
St. Paul’s argument (which has already been set out) 
for the soul’s Immortality from the infinite variety 
of the Universe. They may be said to justify or 
allow (and they need do no more) the belief in a 
sublime and sacred world although invisible, a world 
transcending human sense, a world Divine. And 



EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


205 

if it is possible and reasonable to believe in such a 
world as the home of human souls or human spirits, 
then it is enough to show that the belief itself is 
consonant with the general course or constitution 
of the Universe. 

Let me put the argument from the constitution 
of the Universe in this way. 

Nature, scientifically regarded, makes it probable 
that the individual soul is not destroyed by death. 
The constitution of Nature, so far as it is at 
present understood, leaves ample scope for a life 
independent of those conditions of time and 
space which regulate human existence in this 
world. The life of spirits centres in God, who 
is Himself “ Spirit.” It participates, though not 
unrestrictedly, in the attributes of the Divine 
Being. It is a life without which the intellectual 
and moral laws of the Universe would lack 
completeness; for it would seem to follow, as 
a natural, if not indeed as a necessary inference, 
that if there are higher beings than Man whose 
life is invisible and yet immortal (for the angels 
of God, it is written, never die); and if there are 
lower beings too, such as the animals, whose life 
is material and transitory, in a sense in which 


206 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


Man’s is not, and incapable of a pure spirituality, 
then Man himself, as standing between the two 
orders of being should enjoy a prophetic vision, 
even in this life, of an invisible and Immortal 
Life in which he shall be exalted above his present 
limitation and shall behold the face of God. 

This is the destiny, this the intrinsic dignity of 
Man. 

We may pass, then, from the evidence of the 
Universe to consider the — 

II. Evidence from the nature of Man. 

The question is : Does human nature, considered 
in itself, afford any presumption of Man’s Im¬ 
mortality ? 

It will be understood that under the nature of 
Man is not here included the nature of the human 
soul itself. That will form the subject of considera¬ 
tion in the next chapter. 

The constitution of the Universe is one thing; 
the place of Man within that constitution is another. 

There may be discovered in the Universe general 
laws, such as the law of the indestructibility of 
matter or force called conservation, which make 
it not a difficulty, but a reasonable supposition, that 
the soul of Man should survive the experience known 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


207 


as death. That such a law exists, and that it tells 
in favour of Immortality, has been already argued. 

Or, again, there may be discerned in the nature 
of Man himself such a character of proper dignity 
or perpetuity as suggests, if it does not compel, the 
supposition that his energy will not be limited to 
threescore years and ten. 

It is the tacit or express conviction of such a 
dignity that has probably influenced thinkers, and 
Christian thinkers especially, to believe in the 
Immortality of the human soul, while they denied 
it, or did not assert it, in regard to the souls of the 
lower animals. But the truth or error of this 
supposition can only be determined, if at all, by 
the study of human nature in itself. 

It is strange, as has been said, and yet pathetic, 
to observe how Man has been tempted at one 
time to exaggerate, and at another to depreciate, 
the dignity of his own personal nature. He has 
seemed to himself in history now a little lower 
than the angels, now a little higher than the beasts. 
Of late, perhaps in consequence of the Darwinian 
theory, the dominant note in his estimate of himself 
has been humility. 

It is better in the interest of human virtue that 


208 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


Man should take too high than too low a view of 
his own nature. But the truth can be learnt 
only by a study of human nature itself. 

We have seen that it consists of three parts, viz., 
of body, soul, and spirit. We have seen that these 
parts are logically separable. We have seen that 
the spirit or spiritual faculty is the highest part 
in human nature. And we have seen that, in 
proportion as Man cultivates and elevates the 
spiritual part of his nature, he is assimilated to the 
Being of God. 

It is evident then that, if any part of Man’s 
composite nature is endowed with an essential 
Immortality, it is the spirit. 

Conversely if there is any part which is essentially 
incapable of Immortality, it is the body. 

But in life the spirit and the body (I do not now 
speak of the soul) are intimately and indissolubly 
united. 

In death the union is dissolved. 

It has been argued, as an argument against Immor¬ 
tality, that the dissolution of the union between spirit 
and body must involve the destruction of identity. 
If that argument were sound it would be fatal to 
the great belief for which I plead. But is it sound ? 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


209 


All depends upon the question of identity, and 
upon the way in which identity is affected by 
natural changes. It is not necessary to define in 
what identity consists; it is enough to show that 
a being may undergo great and critical vicissitudes 
of substance and form, and among them grave 
personal losses and diminutions as well as accre¬ 
tions, without sacrificing his identity. 

Thus there is no doubt that the passing from 
infancy to boyhood or girlhood, and from these 
into the perfect state of manhood or womanhood, 
leaves the identity of the individual unimpaired. 
And this is so, although the physical or material 
part of Man’s being, i.e. t his body, is constantly 
changing; it is scientifically held to undergo a 
complete change in some seven years. Yet a man 
speaks of himself as the same, and is the same, 
although no particle of his body remains un¬ 
changed. Identity, then, whatever it may strictly be, 
does not consist in the material substance of the 
body. In what, then, does it consist if not in the soul ? 

Again, the body may suffer grave losses and 
mutilations without any detriment to personality 
or identity. Thus a man who has lost his legs or 
arms or other parts of his body is still as much a 
p 


210 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


human being, and is the same human being, as 
he was when he was physically perfect. It is 
evident that the dissolution or amputation of much, 
and perhaps of all, that is material and physical 
in human nature does not, or at least need not, 
imply the destruction of his being, or of that part 
of his being which constitutes himself, i.e ., his soul. 

Bishop Butler, in the first chapter of the first 
part of his Analogy , considers, as is well known, 
the question of identity in reference to the change 
actually or possibly effected by death. The con¬ 
clusion to which he comes is important. “ Our 
finding,” he says, “that the dissolution of matter, 
in which living beings were most nearly interested, 
is not their dissolution, and that the destruction 
of several of the organs and instruments of per¬ 
ception and of motion belonging to them is not 
their destruction, shows demonstratively that there 
is no ground to think that the dissolution of any 
other matter, or destruction of any other organs 
and instruments, will be the dissolution or destruc¬ 
tion of living agents from the like kind of relation. 
And we have no reason to think we stand in any 
other kind of relation to anything which we find 
dissolved by death.” 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


2 11 


If then the separability of the soul from the 
body, and its continuance in life after separation, 
is rendered possible as a belief by these and other 
similar considerations, it is borne out by the positive 
evidences of the soul’s independent existence which 
lie within common experience. Such are the 
phenomena of dreams or waking visions, imagi¬ 
nation, memory and consciousness. All these show 
or tend to show the reality of an intellectual, as well 
as of a spiritual, existence distinct from the bodily. 

Such then is the primary argument for the 
possibility (to put it at the lowest) of the soul’s 
survival after death and its Immortality. Death, 
like decay or disease, does not apparently affect 
what is necessary or vital to being; it affects 
the external attributes but not the essential nature 
of Man; it cannot therefore be held to imply 
dissolution or destruction of the man himself. 

The phenomena of consciousness show the soul 
during life to be independent of the body. The soul 
or spirit asserts and exhibits itself during life in 
activities wholly distinct from the corporeal. And 
it is precisely these activities which are highest 
and purest and most widely removed from associa¬ 
tion with the body — wonder, enlightenment, rapture, 


212 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


devotion, adoration—that are believed to find their 
perfect sphere of exercise in the world that is 
invisible and immortal. 

But this primary argument is only preparatory to 
the evidences which make the belief in Immortality 
reasonable or probable. For it may be true that 
physical decay or death does not necessarily imply 
the destruction of the soul, and yet that truth does 
not in itself establish a conviction of the soul’s 
Immortality. 

In any such conviction the study of human nature 
becomes important. 

But that study raises the question of Man’s legiti¬ 
mate place in the Universe. His place, if it can be 
ascertained, will afford grounds for an estimate of 
his destiny. 

Man is not, it has been said, a good judge of his 
own nature. Yet he is the sole judge. He may be 
tempted to set his nature too high or too low, but 
he must pass judgment upon it, if he aspires to 
know himself. 

It may be asked then : Does the nature of Man, 
impartially considered as far as it may be, suggest 
for him a destiny so august as a spiritual Im¬ 
mortality ? 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


213 


It is not right, in any survey of human nature, 
to exaggerate the distinction between Man and the 
lower animals. Nor is it necessary; for the means 
of estimating Man’s destiny lie in his nature as it is, 
not in the dignity of its origin or in a comparison 
between it and other natures. Whether it is im¬ 
mediately derived from the dust of the earth or 
from a lower form of animal life is not a considera¬ 
tion that affects the capacity of Man for the spiritual 
life in the present or the future. 

But whatever be the origin of Man’s nature, it 
remains true that Man is the climax of the visible 
creation. As the spirit is supreme among the 
elements of Man’s nature, so is Man in his nature 
supreme among the multitude of created beings. 
There is a gradual evolutionary process from the 
lowest created being upwards to Man and among 
men to the highest Man. It is difficult to believe 
that at Man, i.e., at human nature as it now is seen, 
the process stops short. Human nature contains 
within itself the promise of better things than now 
appear. Man looks beyond the present to futurity. 

The superior dignity of Man to other creatures is 
so much added to the strength of the case for his 
Immortality. Whatever argument is adduced for the 


214 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


probable Immortality of the lower animals holds 
more than good for the Immortality of Man. 
If the constitution of the Universe, as has been 
suggested, leads to the belief or the supposition that 
those animals are immortal, that belief or sup¬ 
position is greatly strengthened in the case of 
mankind. For it is Man’s admitted superiority to 
the animals that has been regarded by philosophical 
thinkers in recent no less than in former days as 
one main proof of his Immortality. So Dr. 
Martineau says, “A higher destiny (than that of 
animals) is claimed for man, on the strength of 
his higher nature .” 1 And Mr. Fiske, “To deny 
the everlasting persistence of the spiritual element 
in Man is to rob the whole process ( i.e ., the process 
of evolution) of its meaning .” 2 For indeed the 
Immortality of the soul or spirit of Man is, as it 
seems, the only probable consummation of the 
cosmical process which dominates the ages. 

It is because Man is potentially so great in in¬ 
tellect and spirit, that he claims an immortal 
existence. To realise the greatness of Man is to 
realise his eternity. It follows that in proportion 

1 A Study of Religion , book iv., chap, i., vol. ii., p. 324. 

2 The Destiny of Man , p. 115. 


EVIDENCES FOE THE BELIEF 


2I 5 

to the elevation of a human character is the diffi¬ 
culty of believing it to be mortal. All the great and 
the good upon earth in all the ages have rendered 
to mankind this signal service, that they have 
exalted and amplified the hopes of human destiny. 
But among all Jesus Christ stands supreme. For 
He revealed before men’s eyes a life so spiritual, 
so sacred, so Divine, that they who saw it knew 
it to be victorious over death. But of this life 
we shall speak in the last chapter. We refer to it 
here only because it seems that one reason why 
men are apt to doubt the doctrine of Immortality 
is that their own lives are poor, ignoble and earth- 
bound. Could they but rise above themselves and 
their own circumstances, they would rise into the 
atmosphere of Immortality. 

It is the religious life at its highest which postu¬ 
lates Immortality. The quality of sanctity forbids 
the idea of death. To know God is to anticipate the 
Divine life. When St. Paul was “caught up to 
the third heaven,” and “ heard unspeakable words 
which it is not lawful for a man to utter,” he could 
no longer believe in his mortality. The Immortal 
Life, the life of one who had “ risen with Christ,” 
became to him an axiom of Theology. 


2 l6 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


But if the experiences and emotions of religion 
are, as indeed they are, the most powerful and 
convincing witnesses of Immortality, they are not 
the only witnesses. The rapture or enthusiasm of 
the saints suggests Immortality, as evincing the 
reality of faculties and sentiments which do not 
and cannot find satisfaction in this life. But human 
nature is rich in suggestions of the Unseen ; for 
to no man are there lacking powers and occasions, 
many or few, when he becomes fully aware of the 
powers, which take him, as it were, out of himself, 
beyond himself, and make him participant in a 
life higher than his own. 

Such intimations of Immortality lie in the realms 
of art, of poetry, of eloquence. 

Art is not the mere imitation of Nature. It is the 
idealisation of Nature. Art is to Nature what the 
soul is to the body of Man. It is something sub¬ 
lime, ethereal, Divine, like beauty itself. 

Among the arts there is none so spiritual as 
music. No art evokes results so wonderful by 
means so slender. None is so mysterious or so 
magical. None lifts Man so near to Heaven. How 
is it then that the simple notes of Music exercise 
this strange imperious spell ? It is not in them- 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


2 I 7 

selves ; they are but the instruments to set free, 
as it were, from captivity the secret emotions and 
aspirations of the soul. They reveal Man to him¬ 
self, by exalting him above himself. 

Nor is it to music alone, though to music in the 
highest degree, that this strange influence belongs. 
The masterpieces of art, the intuitions of poetry, 
the supreme efforts of eloquence, are all alike 
capable of lifting the soul, though for a brief 
space, into a higher life and a grander sphere than 
the terrestrial. 

And something of the same effect is seen in those 
rare moments when a man transcends the narrow 
interests by which his life is too often and painfully 
fettered, when he knows that net in self-love, but 
in self-sacrifice and devotion, does his true good lie. 
For the heroisms and sanctities of life are, as it 
were, attestations of a kinship with Divinity. Of 
this spiritual kinship Wordsworth’s poetry affords 
the most natural and beautiful expression. Thus 
it is when he writes : 

u Enough if something from our hands have power 
To live and act and serve the future hour, 

And if as tow’rd the silent tomb we go 

Through love, through hope and faith’s transcendent dower, 

We feel that we are greater than we know.” 1 


The River Duddon. Afterthought 



2 l8 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


But it is in the Ode on the Intimations of Im¬ 
mortality that Wordsworth’s teaching attains to its 
highest point. That teaching has often been com¬ 
pared to the doctrine of 'AvdfjLPTjais or Remini¬ 
scence which is used by Socrates in the Phcedo 
as one of his reasons for anticipating the Immor¬ 
tality of the soul. Yet at first sight the contrast 
seems greater than the similarity. For while Plato 
rests his plea for Immortality upon a process of 
remembering, Wordsworth rests his upon a process 
of oblivion. 

“ Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” 

Yet there is a deeper sense in which the poet and 
the philosopher are at one. For alike they make 
their appeal to an intuition, a knowledge beyond 
the range of experience, and to that knowledge as 
lifting Man above the things of earth. That 
such teaching implies the pre-existence even more 
than the present or future existence of the soul is a 
thought common to both, and it is a thought which 
will claim consideration, but not here. All that need 
now be said is that, if there be something in Man 
which has caught glimpses of a supernatural glory, 
if it be true, as the poet tells, that 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


219 


“ Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 

But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God who is our home,” 

then that something is eternal, it is Divine. 

Thus the highest teachings of the old world and of 
the new agree in their witness to that mystery of 
human nature (as I have ventured to call it), that 
greater something than earthly greatness which is 
in Man the evidence of the Divine. 

It was not in Wordsworth’s view to dwell upon 
the witness of the conscience. Yet conscience is 
a prophetic part of human nature; it is a sanctuary 
within Man, and it attests his affinity to God. I 
cannot think of conscience solely as the product 
of accumulated earthly experiences. It speaks with 
an authority higher than of earth. It is the voice of 
God. And as being such it points, like other high 
endowments of Man, only with an emphasis to 
which no other endowment attains, to Man’s 
unique character and to his immortal destiny. 

For all the faculties and capacities of Man 
which have been enumerated, reaching out as 
they do beyond the present or material life into 
the spiritual regions of Eternity, are so many 
indications and intimations of the future which 


220 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


awaits him when he shall be emancipated from 
the flesh. 

From such witnesses of Immortality it is natural 
to pass to what has been theologically termed the 
argumentum ab appetitu ceternitatis , i.e., the argu¬ 
ment that Man is immortal because he naturally 
and intensely desires Immortality. 

We have to consider the value or cogency of that 
argument. 

It has been already shown that human nature in¬ 
stinctively shrinks from the prospect of annihilation. 
But is the wish for Immortality a proof of it ? 

All depends, it would seem, upon the motive 
underlying the wish. 

The argument for Immortality from the mere 
desire of it is easily misunderstood. Young, the 
author of the Night Thoughts , put it in this bald form : 

“ Who wishes life immortal proves it too.” 

But to say that a mere wish is a proof that the wish 
will be granted is to put a weapon into the hand of 
the sceptics. We wish for many things in this life 
and do not gain them. Why should we assume 
that a wish will be gratified just because it refers to 
the future life ? If we may argue at all from this 
world to the next, we must argue that the unknown 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


221 


will be like the known. We cannot argue that a 
want of which we are conscious in the known world 
will become a satisfaction in the unknown. 

The absurdity of the inference drawn from Man’s 
desire to his destiny has been exhibited by numerous 
writers, and among modern writers especially by 
Hume in his posthumous Essay upon Immortality , 
and by Hume’s exponent, the late Professor Huxley. 
But all depends, as has been said, upon the motive 
of the wish. 

What is it that makes men yearn for Immortality ? 

The desire is plainly not a mere selfish appetite. 
We do not desire Immortality for ourselves alone, 
we desire it for others; nay, we desire it more for 
others than for ourselves. 

For when is it that the desire is strongest in our 
hearts ? When is it most apt to become invincible 
and inextinguishable ? It is by the graveside of one 
whom we have loved. Such an one was brave and 
vigorous but a few hours ago. Now he is cold. 
There is a feeling in our hearts that a wrong has 
been done him whom we loved, if his activity, so 
bright and beautiful as it was, has been cut short. 
Our hearts revolt at the idea that the change which 
an hour has wrought in him is final and eternal. 


222 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


Against this idea such poems as Lycidas or Adonais 
or In Memoriam are burning protests. They express 
not what we wish, but what we feel to be the due of 
the dead. We desire Immortality because without 
it the fate of others, even more than our own, leaves 
a feeling of dissatisfaction in our minds, as if a plan 
of which we had been permitted to see the outlines 
should lack completion for ever. 

But is the desire more than a breathing of despair ? 
Let us look at it more closely. 

The desire for Immortality is the desire that the 
nature of Man may receive its legitimate consumma¬ 
tion. It issues then from a study of human nature. 
As the process of the world tends to the supremacy of 
Man among the animals, so it tends to the supremacy 
of the psychical or spiritual part of human nature. 

But the soul or spirit is seen to be progressing to¬ 
wards a certain goal. It is seen to be triumphing over 
its limitations and imperfections. It is seen to be 
approximating to the Divine. In the highest and 
holiest natures it is unmistakably tending towards 
a greater than human perfection. All at once, upon 
the theory of annihilation, the process ceases. This 
is the paradox from which human nature recoils. 
“We desire Immortality,” says Jean Paul Richter, 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


223 


“ not as the reward of virtue, but as its continuance.” 
It is not the thought that oar life or our virtue — it is 
the thought that virtue itself should die — which is 
soul-saddening. The desire for Immortality is like 
the desire in Man for happiness. Man desires 
happiness, he is capable of happiness, without 
happiness his life is incomplete and inharmonious. 
This is an argument that the Creator intended him 
to be happy. Similarly the thought or desire of 
Immortality is an argument that Man is an immortal 
being. For Immortality is essential to the purpose 
of human life; and if it is permissible to believe 
that life must fulfil its purpose, then it is necessary 
to believe in its Immortality. Thus Addison in his 
Cato has these lines : 

“ It must be so; Plato, thou reasonest well ! 

Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, 

This longing after Immortality ? 

Or whence this secret dread and inward horror 
Of falling into naught ? Why shrinks the soul 
Back on herself and startles at destruction? 

’Tis the Divinity that stirs within us; 

’Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, 

And intimates eternity to Man .” 1 

No doubt it may be said that this argument from 
the desire to the fact of Immortality depends upon 


1 Act v., scene 1. 


224 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


the belief in the beneficence of the Almighty. It 
does so depend, but not entirely; for human nature 
is a witness to its own capacity, and there is that in 
Man which claims an immortal destiny. And this 
claim is not local or partial, but is found everywhere 
among all races and at all periods of History. 

The desire of Immortality, like the religious sense 
(of which indeed it is a part), possesses the character 
of a universal creed. Everywhere Man is found to 
believe in God or in Divine or supernatural beings. 
Everywhere too he believes in the existence of souls 
or spirits after death. 

It is true, indeed, that the universality of religion 
as an element in human thought, has been denied. 
There is nothing perhaps that may not be denied. 
And even if primitive Man were not a religious 
being, it would be no disproof of religion. For 
upon speculative matters, as has been already said, 
it is not in the crude imaginations of savages but 
in the tendencies and judgments of civilised man¬ 
kind that the truth may be more probably thought 
to reside. But modern anthropological research, by 
its patience and industry, has gone far to reassert 
the universality of the religious sentiment. Professor 
Max Muller puts it in these words, “ We may 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


225 

safely say that, in spite of all researches, no human 
beings have been found anywhere who do not 
possess something which to them is religion, or 
to put it in the most general form, a belief in some¬ 
thing beyond what they can see with their eyes.” 
And he quotes from Professor Tiele this striking 
passage: “The statement that there are nations or 
tribes which possess no religion rests either on 
inaccurate observations or on a confusion of ideas. 
No tribe or nation has yet been met with destitute 
of belief in any higher beings, and travellers who 
asserted their existence have been afterwards refuted 
by facts. It is legitimate, therefore, to call religion 
in its most general sense an universal phenomenon 
of humanity.” 1 

As it is with religion, so is it with the belief in the 
world beyond the grave. “The belief of mankind,” 
says Mr. Alger, “ that a soul or spirit survives the 
body has been so nearly universal as to appear like 
the spontaneous result of an instinct.” 2 

It is true that the belief in the survival of the soul 
after death, like religion itself, was at first rudimen¬ 
tary ; it was but the germ or promise of something 

1 Hibbert Lectures , ii., p. 79. 

2 A Critical History of the Doctrine of the Future Life , p. 583. 

Q 


226 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


higher; it was sometimes so vague or faint 
that even keen observers could not detect it, 
but it was there; and whatever sanction a creed 
may claim, as having been widely and universally 
accepted at all stages of history, belongs to the 
faith that the soul of Man survives the grave. 
There is no people which does not exhibit that 
faith. 

To the witness, then, of the soul’s desire for 
Immortality (however that witness may be estimated) 
must be added the corroborating assurance of its 
universality. 

Even this force it would be wrong to over¬ 
estimate. I am contending for the reasonableness 
— the probability of faith in Immortality, not 
for its certainty. But one who recognises that the 
same, or the same sort of evidence, is adducible 
from history for the belief in Immortality as 
for religion itself, and that the one as well as 
the other is apparently a spontaneous universal 
outcome of the nature of Man, will probably 
feel himself strengthened in his conviction of 
a life surpassing and transcending the life of 
earth. 

We may now summarise the evidences for 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


227 


Immortality deducible from the nature of Man 
himself. 

We have seen that Man is the climax of the 
visible creation; to him, as it were, the visible 
creation tends. 

We have seen that in Man the spiritual part of 
his being is the highest, the most sacred, the 
nearest to God. 

We have seen that according to analogy the 
separation of the soul from the body and the dis¬ 
solution of the body does not necessitate or imply 
the death of the spirit. 

We have seen that Man himself expects and 
demands Immortality ; it is his hope, his guide, the 
postulate of his nature. 

We have seen that this hope is strongest and most 
imperious in the highest and most God-like human 
natures. 

We have seen intimations of an essential affinity 
between the highest part of human nature and the 
spiritual world. 

We have seen that without human Immortality 
the great cosmical process is bereft of its full sig¬ 
nificance. 

And we have seen that the conviction of personal 


228 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


Immortality or survival after death has been at one 
period or other the universally prevalent faith of all 
races and all regions of mankind. 

But these considerations, strong as they are, 
deserve to be weighed in the light of the Divine 
Nature (so far as it is known to us), and of that 
Nature viewed relatively to mankind. 

In regard, then, to Immortality we will now con¬ 
sider the — 

III. Evidence from the Being of God. 

It has been no part of this essay to argue for the 
belief in God. 

But it is obvious that that belief affects all other 
beliefs and aspects of belief. To one who holds the 
Being of God all Nature is full of hints, suggestions, 
and intimations which otherwise do not occur to 
the mind. Indeed, it is strange that men should 
make so much of differences among believers in 
God, however serious these differences may be, 
when the vital difference is between those whose 
view of nature is secular and materialistic, and 
those whose view is spiritual. 

But if there is any belief which is sanctioned and 
enforced by faith in God, it is the belief in Immor¬ 
tality. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


229 


The two beliefs, in God and in Immortality, are 
complementary; they are linked together so indis¬ 
solubly that, where the one is found, the other is 
sure to follow. As a rule, he who believes in God 
believes in Immortality, and he who believes in 
Immortality believes in God. 

Thus Paley writes in his Natural Theology: 

“ It is one thing to maintain the doctrine of 
Providence along with that of a future state and 
another thing without it. In my opinion the two 
doctrines must stand or fall together. For although 
more of this apparent chance may perhaps upon 
other principles be accounted for than is generally 
supposed, yet a future state alone rectifies all 
disorders/’ 1 

To the Theist, then, the doctrine of Immortality 
is of as much concern as to the Christian. Without 
it Theism can no more than Christianity essay to 
solve the enigma of human life. And yet it is a 
doctrine appealing with special emphasis to Chris¬ 
tian hearts. If it be true, as has been well said, that 
“all questions concerning human Immortality may 
be traced back to our idea of God,” then it may be 
urged, as by Bishop Martensen, that “the God of 

1 Chap. xxvi. 


2 3 0 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


Revelation is Love, and He therefore has interest in 
the monadic, the minute, and individual. He can 
find no adequate form of Revelation for Himself, 
save in a Kingdom of individuals who are immortal, 
and whom He will make partakers of His own 
eternity and blessedness. This is the proof of 
Immortality which Christ gives to the Sadducees 
when He says, ‘God is not the God of the dead but 
of the living, for all live unto Him.’ ” 1 

The belief in God is encompassed with its 
own proper difficulties. But wherever the belief 
in God is found, there is found the belief in 
Immortality. The two are inseparable. For the 
face of the world is so hard to reconcile with a 
belief in the omnipotence and beneficence of the 
Creator that, if that belief exists, it cannot but 
postulate, as a corollary, the belief in a compensa¬ 
tory future. 

In the last chapter, where the value of the belief 
in Immortality was set forth, certain considerations 
were urged; and it is these considerations and 
others like them which arise upon the theory of a 
Divine Almighty Providence. Thus it may be 
assumed that the purpose of God in Creation will 

1 Christian Dogmatics, § 274. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


231 


be ultimately achieved. Nature exhibits signs of 
purpose, it is clearly progressive; it is not drifting 
idly ; it is making for an end. Nay, not so only, 
but the end of Nature is plainly associated with the 
destiny of Man. Whatever be the final goal of 
Nature, Man is involved in it. Of all created beings 
then Man is the last who, upon the hypothesis of a 
Providence, can be condemned to a hopeless and 
purposeless existence. Yet so it would be, if his life 
should end in death. Goethe seems to have felt 
this difficulty so keenly that it led him to his faith 
in Immortality. “ Ich zweifle nicht an unserem Fort- 
dauer, denn die Natur kann die Entelechie nicht 
entbehren .” 1 

Human life indeed, in the point of view of 
religion, is a discipline. It is an education. But 
education points to something beyond itself. It is 
not understood unless in reference to futurity. Man 
is a scholar in the school of Divine Providence. 
He learns his lesson slowly and often painfully. If 
death is his end then, he dies before the lesson is 
learnt. This was the ground upon which Kant, in 
the name of the Practical Reason, postulated an end- 

1 “ I have no doubt as to our continued existence, for Nature can¬ 
not forego her actuality (Entelechie).”— Gesprache mit Eckermann, 
vol. ii., p. 101. 


232 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


less duration of personality, arguing that the moral 
law demanded infinite progress in the rational being, 
and that infinite progress was impossible except in 
Immortality. 

The honour of God, it may almost be said with¬ 
out irreverence, is concerned in the satisfaction of 
the human desire for Immortality. For who can 
bear to think of the Creator as inspiring in human 
hearts a passionate and righteous sentiment, and 
making that sentiment the means by which Hu¬ 
manity is drawn into stronger sympathy and more 
loving intimacy with Himself, amd then letting 
the sentiment fail of satisfaction at the last ? But it 
is needless to press this point; for religious minds, 
impressed as they have been by the disciplinary 
character of life, have never failed to look beyond it 
to an Immortality. 

Yet again the belief in the Eternity of God 
demands Immortality for those great attributes or 
ideas which centre in His Being. Such are the 
ideas of Truth, Justice, Purity, Love. We cannot 
conceive of these ideas as temporary or mutable. 
We are sure that they are immortal. If they are not 
endowed with Immortality, if they are not the same 
here and everywhere, now and for ever, then their 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


233 


claim upon the allegiance of Humanity disappears. 
So the poet sings : 

“ Truth for truth and good for good ! The Good, the True, the 
Pure, the Just. 

Take the charm i Forever’ from them, and they crumble into 
dust .” 1 

But these ideas, as humanly conceived, are resi¬ 
dent in the spirit. They are not of the body or the 
mind, but of the spirit. And if so, then the eternity 
of the ideas implies the eternity of the spirit which 
contains them. 

It is needless to dwell upon the vindication of the 
Divine Equity and the Divine Providence within 
the spaces of the infinite future; for this has been 
already considered as part of the satisfaction for 
which the human soul is permitted to look in 
Eternity. It is enough to say that the Almighty in 
virtue of His Infinity demands infinity wherein to 
reveal Himself to His creatures. 

Let us, then, see what it is that the argument for 
Immortality from the Being of God may be said to 
amount to. ^ 

God is ex hypothesi perfect in Wisdom, in Power 
and in Love. 

1 Tennyson, Locksley Hall\ Sixty Years After. 


234 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


It is a justifiable expectation that He shall reveal 
the perfectness of His attributes to His sentient, 
intelligent and moral creatures. But the justification 
is not complete in the present life. It demands a 
life transcending and surviving the present. 

Again, the Infinity of the Divine Nature charac¬ 
terises the moral qualities which are the necessary 
attributes of Divinity. But these qualities inform 
Humanity and invest it with an eternal character. 

And, lastly, the disciplinary or educational char¬ 
acter of the present life postulates a future life 
as a part of the Divine Counsel; and the spiritual 
or immortal element in Man, whereby he is allied to 
God, postulates Eternity. 

This chapter, then, has suggested the external 
evidences for the soul’s Immortality, i.e., such 
evidences as lie in the constitution of the Universe, 
in the nature of Man, and in the Being of God. 

It is now time to consider the internal evidences, 
i.e., the witness of the soul to itself. 


CHAPTER V 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 
B. Internal Evidences 

It has already been remarked that there is a dif¬ 
ficulty in distinguishing the various evidences or 
lines of evidence for the great belief which is under 
consideration. 

Even between the external and internal evidences 
(as they have been called) for the belief, it is not an 
easy thing to draw an absolute line. 

Thus the being of God is an external evidence 
for Immortality ; but if Man be made, as he is, in 
the image of God, the eternity of God stands in 
direct relation to the eternity of Man. 

Further, the testimony of the soul to itself is an 
intricate question. We are concerned to know 
what is the nature of the soul. In the default or 
deficiency of external evidence we seek to learn from 

23s 


236 THE hope of immortality 

the soul itself what it is. But in so doing we are 
treating the subject of our inquiry as our wit¬ 
ness. 

Yet however difficult it may be to judge of the 
soul by studying the soul itself, no study can be 
more interesting, or so far as it can be prosecuted, 
more convincing. To some minds it will seem the 
only satisfactory way of arriving at a conclusion 
respecting the probable destiny of the soul. 

Thus Emerson says, “ Immortality is a doctrine 
too great to rest on any legend that is on any man’s 
experience but our own. It must be proved, if at 
all, from our own activity and designs which imply 
an interminable future for their play.” 1 

Such a statement clearly means that the study of 
the soul in itself will produce a conviction of its 
Immortality. 

What, then, is the soul? 

The soul in its proper nature has been the subject 
of discussion and, so far as possible, of definition 
in the first chapter. It has been defined as the 
total sum of the intellectual, moral and spiritual 
faculties belonging to human nature. In Dr. 
Martineau’s explicit words already quoted it is “the 

1 Conduct of Life. Essay on Worship. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


237 


constant centre to which we refer all our acts as 
their source and all our experiences as their recep¬ 
tacle.” 

It is not now with the soul, abstractedly con¬ 
sidered, but with its faculties or qualities as leading 
to a belief in its immortal destiny, that we are con¬ 
cerned. And of these there are four which have 
been recognised, more or less widely, by philo¬ 
sophical thinkers, in modern times and in ancient, 
as attributes characteristic of Immortality, viz., its 
immateriality, its indissolubility, its spontaneous 
energy, and its affinity to the Divine Nature. Each 
of these four qualities has, at some time or other, 
been held to be in itself a sufficient proof that the 
soul is immortal; but the cumulative evidence of 
all is necessarily more forcible than the evidence of 
any one taken by itself. It will be well to consider 
them in order, and first — 

(1) The immateriality of the soul. 

It must be admitted that this argument will not 
appeal to one who takes a material, and not a 
spiritual, view of the Universe. If there is nothing 
in the Universe but what is material, then either 
there is no such thing as soul, or the soul is 
material and therefore mortal. The belief in the 


238 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


immateriality of the soul is a spiritual belief, and, 
as being such, it coincides with the belief in God. 
But this is only one more proof that speculation 
concerning the nature or destiny of the soul must 
go back ultimately to the question of the Divine 
Being. To hold that there is no such thing as soul 
or spirit is to hold that there is no God; for God 
is Spirit, and the spiritual world is, so to say, the 
reflexion of His Eternal Spiritual Presence. 

It has been urged in the last chapter that the 
faiths in God and in an Immortal Life are correla¬ 
tive ; each of them, not only in fact but in logic, 
implies the other. 

In arguing, then, from the immateriality of the 
soul to its Immortality, it is necessary to assume the 
existence of spirit and a spiritual world. But if that 
assumption is once made, there can be no doubt that 
the soul is not material but spiritual. But matter is 
perishable, or more strictly, dissoluble. The soul, 
then, being immaterial is imperishable, or to put the 
argument in a syllogistic form: 

It is a property of matter to perish or to be dis¬ 
solved ; 

But the soul is immaterial; 

Therefore the soul is imperishable; or to speak 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


2 39 


correctly, the perishableness of matter affords no 
presumption that the soul will perish. 

The argument so stated must not be pressed 
unduly. It is in effect rather negative than positive. 
It does not prove the Immortality of the soul, but 
it proves that the Immortality is possible. For as 
the signs and evidences of dissolution are all 
associated with matter, it follows that they do not 
and cannot apply to any immaterial or spiritual 
entity. The utmost which it is possible to say is 
that the laws of the material world are more or less 
known, the laws of the spiritual world are unknown; 
but, inasmuch as spirit is wholly different from 
matter, it is reasonable to conceive of the spiritual 
laws as different from the material. 

Still the fact of the soul’s immateriality, as tend¬ 
ing to establish its immortal destiny, has so greatly 
influenced Christian thought, and indeed amounts 
to so high an evidential probability, that it demands 
a sympathetic regard. 

To quote one authority out of many: 

Thomas Aquinas argues that the soul, like God 
Himself, like the angels, is a forma separata , i.e. y an 
immaterial form ; and that, as being immaterial, it 
is immortal, as such a form cannot in the nature of 


240 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


things destroy itself, nor can it by the dissolution of 
any material underlying substance be destroyed . 1 

The Schoolmen generally under the influence of 
Aquinas rested their belief in the soul’s Immortality, 
not indeed wholly, but in a large degree, upon its 
immaterial nature. And from them the belief in 
the soul’s immateriality as a positive doctrine has 
descended to modern thought, and, wherever the 
distinction between soul and matter has been real¬ 
ised, the Immortality of the soul has been held to 
be a natural consequence of its immateriality. 

(2) But when it has been asked why the imma¬ 
teriality of the soul constitutes deathlessness, then 
has emerged the second of the arguments adduced 
on internal grounds for Immortality, viz., that the 
soul is in its nature indissoluble, and that indissolu¬ 
bility precludes destruction or death. 

This is perhaps a philosophical rather than a 
religious argument. It finds its first and simplest 
expression in the Phcedo? Socrates there argues 
that “the soul is in the very likeness of the Divine 
and immortal and intellectual and uniform and 
indissoluble and unchangeable; and that the body 

1 Summa Theologies , part i., question lxxv. 

2 Phcedoy p. 80. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


241 


is in the very likeness of the human and mortal 
and unintellectual and multiform and dissoluble and 
changeable,” and that, as the body itself is not at 
once dissolved by death, but remains intact for a 
time, and if it be embalmed in the Egyptian manner, 
for an indefinitely long time, it is impossible to con¬ 
ceive of the soul as being destroyed as soon as it has 
left the body ; the soul will rather depart in peace 
to the invisible world which is its true home. 

As often happens, the proof which Socrates gives 
of his tenet is rather suggested than expressed ; but 
it lies, as may be seen, in the assumed affinity of 
the nature of the soul to the Divine Nature. 

However, the view that the soul is indissoluble 
and therefore immortal has been widely entertained 
in Christian Theology. 

Thus Gregory of Nyssa, after speaking of the 
“ vivifying influence of the soul as exercised in a 
mysterious manner upon the body, urges that as, 
while the framework of the body still holds together, 
each individual part is possessed of a soul which 
penetrates equally every component member, . . . 
so, when that framework is dissolved, and has 
returned to its kindred elements, there is nothing 
against probability that that simple and incomposite 


242 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


essence ( a7r\rj kcli ac-vvOeros (frvcns) which has once for 
all by some inexplicable law grown with the growth 
of the bodily framework, should continually remain 
beside the atoms with which it has been blended, 
and should in no way be sundered from a union 
once formed. For it does not follow that, because 
the composite is dissolved, the incomposite must be 
dissolved with it.” 1 

Somewhat similar is the argument of Augustine : 
“ The nature of the soul itself has no kind of 
material existence in space. For whatever consists 
of any kind of gross matter must necessarily be 
divisible into parts, having one in one place and 
another in another. . . . The nature of the soul, on 
the other hand, though we leave out of account its 
power of perceiving truth, and consider only its 
inferior power of giving unity to the body, and of 
sensation in the body, does not appear to have any 
material extension in space. For it is all present in 
each separate part of its body when it is all present 
in any sensation. There is not a smaller part in the 
finger, and a larger in the arm, as the bulk of the 
finger is less than that of the arm ; but the quantity 

1 On the Soul and the Resurrection , p. 437, in the Select Library of 
the Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers. 


EVIDENCES FOE THE BELIEF 


24 3 


everywhere is the same; for the whole is present 
everywhere. For when the finger is touched, the 
whole mind feels, though the sensation is not 
through the whole body. No part of the mind is 
unconscious of the touch, which proves the presence 
of the whole.” 1 

Or to come to modern theologians; Bishop 
Berkeley says: 

“ We have shown that the soul is indivisible, in¬ 
corporeal, unextended, and it is consequently incor¬ 
ruptible. Nothing can be plainer than that the 
motions, changes, decays, and dissolutions which we 
hourly see befall natural bodies (and that is what we 
mean by the course of nature ) cannot possibly affect 
an active , simple , uncompounded substance. Such a 
being, therefore, is indissoluble by the force of nature, 
that is to say, the sold of man is naturally immortal .” 2 

And Bishop Butler: 

“All presumption of death’s being the destruction 
of living beings must go upon the supposition that 
they are compounded, and so discerptible. But 
since consciousness is a single and indivisible 
power, it should seem that the subject in which it 

1 Against the Epistle of Manichceus, chap, xvi., also in the Select 
Library of the Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers. 

2 The Principles of Human Knowledge , part i., § 141. 


244 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


resides must be so too. ... It has been argued 
and, for anything appearing to the contrary, justly, 
that since the perception or consciousness which we 
have of our own existence is indivisible, so that it is 
a contradiction to suppose one part of it should be 
here and the other there; the perceptive power, or 
the power of consciousness, is indivisible too, and 
consequently the subject in which it resides, i.e., the 
conscious being.” 1 

But these opinions of philosophical theologians 
demand corroboration from other masters of philo¬ 
sophical thought. 

The following is the language of Descartes : 

“ Je remarque ici qu’il y a une grande difference 
entre l’esprit et le corps, en ce que le corps, de sa 
nature, est toujours divisible, et que l’esprit est 
entierement indivisible; car en effet, quand je le 
considere, c’est-a-dire, quand je me consid^re moi- 
meme en tant que je suis seulement une chose qui 
pense, je ne puis distinguer en moi aucunes parties, 
mais je connais et congois fort clairement que je 
suis une chose absolument une et entiere .” 2 

It was this view of the soul’s simplicity or indi- 

1 Analogy , part i., chap. i. 

2 Discours de la Methode. Meditation sixieme. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


245 


visibility which led Descartes to place it locally in 
the glans pinealis. 

Leibnitz was naturally disposed by his monadic 
theory to believe in the indissolubility and the 
indestructibility of the soul. He says of it : “Tout 
esprit etant comme un monde a part suffisant a lui- 
meme, independant de toute autre creature, en- 
veloppant l’infini, exprimant l’univers, est aussi 
durable, aussi subsistant et aussi absolu que 
l’univers meme des creatures.” 1 

Modern philosophers have been comparatively 
little occupied with the structural or formative 
nature of the soul. The idea of the soul, like that 
of Heaven itself, has passed imperceptibly by 
common consent into the region of the immaterial. 
And, at least since Kant’s influence became pre¬ 
dominant, there has, I think, been no one who has 
sought to define the nature of the soul, and has 
conceived of it otherwise than as a simple indivisible 
or spiritual entity and, in virtue of being so, im¬ 
mortal. 

But the precise nature of the argument from the 
immateriality of the soul to its Immortality remains 
to be stated. 

1 Systeme nouveau de la Nature , p. 128. 


246 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


What is the differentia or distinctive character of 
the soul ? 

It seems to be this : 

The soul may be conceived as consisting of parts, 
like the body. It is possible and natural to speak of 
the intellectual, the moral, the spiritual parts, i.e., 
faculties, of the soul, as of the brain, heart, arms, 
legs, &c., of the body. But in the soul the dis¬ 
tinction (so far as can be observed) is speculative 
only; in the body it is actual. 

Thus a part of the body can be cut off; it 
becomes then a separate material substance. But 
no mutilation of the soul is possible or conceivable. 

Again, the body is visibly subject to dissolution at 
death. But there is no such evidence of the soul’s 
dissolution. 

The soul is, as it were, a unit or atom; but an 
atom is indissoluble and indestructible; the soul 
therefore must be conceived as enduring eternally. 

If it be asked, What is the logical value of this 
argument ? the answer seems to be that the atomic 
nature of the soul, i.e., its indivisibility, is philo¬ 
sophically a more tenable view than the opposite; 
and it constitutes an a priori probability of the soul’s 
Immortal Life; but the indissolubility, as well as 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


247 


the immateriality, of the soul is but preparatory as 
an evidence for the phenomena which support with 
greater impressiveness the doctrine of Immortality. 

(3) It has often been thought that the intrinsic 
energy or activity of the soul is an indication of its 
character, and so of its destiny. 

The soul, it has been said, is the source of move¬ 
ment ; it acts, it is not primarily acted upon; and, 
as being itself the source of movement, it cannot 
become motionless, i.e ., dead. Upon this view the 
soul is in a measure fettered and cramped by the 
body in life, but death sets it free, and it enters then 
upon a larger life. By nobody has this view been 
expressed or advocated in clearer language than by 
Plato in the Phcedrus. 

“The soul” (says Socrates) “through all her being 
is immortal, for that which is ever in motion is 
immortal; but that which moves another and is 
moved by another, in ceasing to move, ceases also to 
live. Only the self-moving, never leaving self, never 
ceases to move, and is the fountain and begin¬ 
ning of motion to all that moves besides. Now the 
beginning is unbegotten, for that which is begotten 
has a beginning ; but the beginning is begotten of 
nothing, for if it were begotten of something, then 


248 THE hope of immortality 

the begotten would not come from a beginning. But 
if unbegotten, it must be also indestructible; for 
if beginning were destroyed, there could be no be¬ 
ginning out of anything, nor anything out of a begin¬ 
ning ; and all things must have a beginning. And 
therefore the self-moving is the beginning of motion, 
and this can neither be destroyed nor begotten; else 
the whole heavens and all creation would collapse 
and stand still, and never again have motion or birth. 
But if the self-moving is proved to be immortal, he 
who affirms that self-motion is the very idea and 
essence of the soul will not be put to confusion. For 
the body which is moved from without is soulless; 
but that which is moved from within has a soul, for 
such is the nature of the soul. But if this be true, 
must not the soul be self-moving, and therefore of 
necessity unbegotten and immortal ? ” 1 

Nor is this an ancient philosophic fancy which 
has exercised no influence upon thought in Christian 
and modern times. No doubt it is true that Plato 
did not distinguish so carefully as later thinkers 
between the Soul or informing principle of the 
Universe and individual souls. It has sometimes 
seemed to me that the world-soul (if I may call it so) 
1 p. 245, C-E. Cp. Laws , p. 896 a, b. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


249 


of Plato stood in his philosophy in a parallel relation, 
though vastly inferior, to that of the Holy Spirit of 
God in Christian Theology to the spirit of each in¬ 
dividual man. But the inference of the soul’s Im¬ 
mortality from its absolute intrinsic energy has com¬ 
mended itself in one way or another to numerous 
and different minds, as, eg., to Athanasius when he 
wrote in his treatise contra Gentes} “ If, as we have 
shown, the soul moves the body and is not moved by 
other things, it follows that the movement of the soul 
is spontaneous, and that this spontaneous movement 
goes on after the body is laid aside in the earth. . . . 
If the soul is moved by itself, it follows that it out¬ 
lives the body;” or to Goethe, when he said in 
conversation with Eckermann, “ The conviction of 
our continued existence arises in my mind from the 
conception of activity. For if I work unceasingly 
until my end, Nature is bound to allot me another 
form of existence, as the present form can no longer 
support my spirit;” 2 or to Byron, who wrote in his 
diary, “ Of the immortality of the soul it appears 
to me that there can be but little doubt, if we 
attend for a moment to the action of mind. It is 
in perpetual activity.” 

1 Chap. 33. 


2 Gesprache mit Goethe , vol. ii., p. 40. 


250 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


It is difficult to resist the force of this argument. 
The body and the soul, as constituents of human 
nature, stand in sharp contrast. The body in itself 
is mere brute matter, dull, motionless, inert. It is 
so apart from the soul. It is so when the soul leaves 
it at death. But the body when tenanted by the 
soul is alive and mobile ; it is impelled and directed 
by the energy of the soul. And this motive power 
the soul possesses in itself. But if the motive power 
is inherent in the soul, it is eternal, it is as perpetual 
as it is spontaneous, and we cannot conceive of it as 
ceasing to be. Therefore, as the motion is eternal, 
the soul which is its centre and source is eternal 
also. 

Consciousness reveals too that the soul is not only 
the motive power of the body, but that in its own 
movements it is independent wholly or mainly of 
the body. Thus, while the body remains stationary, 
the soul, i.e.y the mind, ranges at will over time and 
space ; it can be a thousand miles from the body, 
while still associated with it; it can conjure up the 
distant past or remote localities; it is uncontrolled 
and uncontrollable ; it treats the body more as a 
slave than as a master. 

It is true that this argument is in a sense logically 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


2 5 * 

allied to the case for the freedom of the will. For 
if there be an original spontaneity of the soul, then 
is it free, and that which is free is immortal. But 
whether this freedom be admitted or not, it is clear 
that, if the soul survives death, it emerges after death 
into a larger life. For upon any reasonable estimate 
of the contrast or antagonism between the soul and 
the body it can hardly be doubtful that the influence 
of the body upon the soul is limiting and darkening; 
it cramps and thwarts the soul and prevents it from 
enjoying the full light and the complete liberty for 
which it yearns. This is an experience that deserves 
to be regarded as universal; for there is no man who 
is not, in his personal struggle with evil, conscious 
of the inimical and perilous energy of “the flesh.” 

The soul, then, so long as it is imprisoned in the 
body, is like a captive, conscious of powers which 
cannot be fully or properly exercised under the 
conditions of the terrestrial life. But it follows, as 
a natural inference, that the soul, when it is eman¬ 
cipated from its present limiting conditions, will or 
may assert the fulness of these powers in the serene 
and holy atmosphere of Heaven. 

(4) And this anticipation of the soul’s future 
leads to the last attribute which has been felt 


252 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


by many thinkers as constituting a witness of the 
soul to its own Immortality, viz., its Divinity , or, to 
speak more strictly, its affinity to the Divine Nature. 

For if it is an indication, as it has appeared to 
be, of Immortality, that the soul should possess an 
intrinsic and unfailing energy, the indication is 
greatly corroborated when that energy is found 
to place the soul in direct and intimate relation 
to God. An energy which is elevating, spiritualis¬ 
ing and sanctifying is a witness that is so strong 
as to be conclusive. Let us look, then, at the 
vaticinations of the soul respecting itself. 

The soul’s conception of its own Immortality 
has often been held to prove that it is essentially 
immortal. Man, it has been said, cannot logically 
think of himself as dead. It is necessary to him 
to conceive of himself as living. But Man may 
be what he can imagine himself to be. The 
inability, then, to realise personal annihilation is 
a just evidence that personality will endure. 

Again, the native gifts or qualities of the soul are 
such as bear the imprint or presage of infinity. They 
admit of no satisfaction in a limited present; they 
augur a limitless futurity. Thought, hope, love, faith, 
devotion are in their nature infinite, and, as such, 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


253 


they postulate an infinite future. No human being 
can be said to exhaust the capacities of these 
qualities upon earth. However great his satisfac¬ 
tions and enjoyments may be, they leave always a 
void, a yearning consciousness of something better 
and more enduring than the present. And capa¬ 
cities which are infinite expect Immortality. “There 
are wondrous impulses in us,” it has been said, 
“constitutional convictions prescient of futurity, 
like those prevising instincts in birds leading them 
to take preparatory flights before their actual 
migration.” 1 

Such are the intimations of Immortality within 
the soul. They are the witnesses to the soul’s 
true character. For that which is capable of 
immortal thought is capable of Immortality. The 
soul moves, as it were, in a larger than earthly 
atmosphere. It deals with infinite space, infinite 
time, infinite aspiration. But infinity is a concep¬ 
tion that transcends experience. The conception 
of infinity, therefore, proves Immortality. 

The study of the human soul reveals it as ever 
reaching out beyond and above itself to a super- 

1 Alger, A Critical History of the Doctrine of the Future Life . 
p. 50. 


254 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


natural attainment and advancement. Its capa¬ 
cities of knowledge, of virtue and of devotion 
remain on earth ever unsatisfied. Man is like a 
traveller in some mountainous country who has 
no sooner surmounted one lofty ridge than he 
sees another, still more arduous, rising before 
him. He never is or will be upon earth what 
he feels he might be, what he knows he ought 
to be. It is to this unsatisfied capacity of human 
nature that Addison alludes in a striking passage 
of the Spectator} “Among other excellent argu¬ 
ments for the immortality of the soul, there is one 
drawn from the perpetual progress of the soul 
to its perfection, without a possibility of ever 
arriving at it. How can it enter into the thoughts 
of man that the soul which is capable of such 
immense perfections and of receiving new im¬ 
provements to all eternity shall fall away into 
nothing almost as soon as it is created? ... To 
look upon the soul as going on from strength to 
strength, to consider that she is to shine for ever 
with new accessions of glory and brighten to all 
eternity, that she will be still adding virtue to virtue 
and knowledge to knowledge, carries in it some- 

1 Spectator , No. 3. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


2 55 


thing wonderfully agreeable to that ambition which 
is natural to the mind of Man.” Or, as a 
modern writer says, “We believe Man immortal, 
not because, as is pretended, thought and con¬ 
sciousness cannot be annihilated, but because the 
human intellectual and moral structure is such as 
to imply an after stage of expansion.” 1 

But we have not yet reached the supreme point 
of this argument. 

It is not in the intellectual or emotional part of 
human nature that Man’s affinity to God is most 
clearly seen. 

Man consists, it has been said, of body, soul and 
spirit. 

The Divine part of his nature is the spirit. 

In his body he is as the brutes. 

In his soul, i.e. f in his reason and emotion, he 
is raised above the brutes, but not entirely removed 
from them. 

In his spirit he is as the angels in Heaven. 

The spirit of Man is the faculty wherein reside 
his faith, his reverence, his passionate desire for God. 

Why should it be thought a thing incredible 
that Man should enter into communion with his 


1 Isaac Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life , p. 233. 


256 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

Maker ? Why should the spiritual experiences of 
the saints — of a St. Francis or a St. Teresa — their 
intuitions of Divine truth, their visions of Heaven, 
their raptures and solaces and revelations — why 
should they all be brushed aside by rude secular 
hands, as though they were unworthy of a serious 
regard ? When full allowance is made for the 
possibilities of self-deception, which is as much 
a peril of the senses as of the spirit, it is, I think, 
impossible to doubt the reality of the communion 
that holy men and women in all Christian ages have 
held with the Father of Spirits. Nay, it is not to 
the saints only as the prize of victory, but to all 
true humble souls which are striving after God, 
that there come ever and again high rapturous 
moments when earthly passions and ambitions fall 
away and the secret of life — the purport of being — 
stands revealed. To this ever-accumulating body 
of evidence religion appeals. It is the heritage 
of faith. It is not of one place or time, but 
universal. It is the eternal witness of the human 
spirit to its Divine Original, to the Home from 
which it came and to which it returns. “ The 
Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that 
we are the children of God.” 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


257 


When it is said in Holy Scripture that Man is 
made in the image of his Maker, it is his spirit 
which is the main (though not, I think, the only) 
point of resemblance. “ Patet dei effigies,” as 
Calvin says, “ad totam prsestantiam qua eminet 
hominis natura inter omnes animantium species.” 1 
But the spirit is the pre-eminent faculty; it is a 
part of the Divine Nature in Man. 

The poets and philosophers of antiquity were 
not unconscious of an affinity between the Divine 
and human natures. St. Paul, addressing the 
Athenians, could quote from “certain of their 
own poets” the words, “we are also His offspring.” 
But it was Christianity that evinced the reality and 
dignity of this Divine sonship. The Incarnation of 
the Son of God created the persuasion that all 
men, as He deigned to call them His “ brethren,” 
were children of His Father. 

If it may be concluded, then, that the spiritual 
faculty in Man is the witness, as it is the centre, 
of his affinity to the Godhead, how great is the 
duty of cultivating the spiritual life! I know no 

1 “ The image of God extends to the whole excellency by which 
Man’s nature surpasses all the species of living things.”— Institutes , 
i. xv. 3. 

S 


258 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


more striking passage even of Pauline theology 

than that in which St. Paul teaches that “the 

natural (tyv^i/cos) man receiveth not the things of 
the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto 

him; neither knoweth he them, because they are 
spiritually discerned; ” and again, “ God hath 
revealed them unto us by His Spirit; for the Spirit 
searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of 

God.” 1 

The spirit of Man, like the body or the mind, 
has its own laws of development or decay. In 
one man the voice of the Spirit is dominant and 
authoritative; in another it speaks but in a whisper. 
The spiritual or eternal verities which are in one 
life the strongest and surest of all motives to 
conduct are in another perhaps uncertain, vague 
and nebulous. And the inference is that he who 
would attain to spiritual knowledge must educate 
and elevate his spirit by the processes which the 
spiritual experience of mankind justifies and re¬ 
commends as the conditions of the spiritual life. 
He must become a spiritual man. 

1 1 Cor. ii. The adjective \//vxik 6 s must clearly be interpreted 
here in the lower or narrower of its two meanings ; it excludes the 
spirit (■ Kvev/xa ). 


EVIDENCES FOE THE BELIEF 


2 59 

We may now summarise the conclusions of this 
chapter. 

The soul, or, in exact Theology, the spirit, is 
the highest element in human nature. It is im¬ 
material and indissoluble; it is therefore immortal. 

In its intellectual, and yet more in its moral and 
spiritual prerogatives, it is allied to the Divine 
Nature; it may therefore be reasonably held to 
participate in the Divine attribute of Immortality. 

By its capacity for infinite thought and infinite 
desire it expects infinity. 

It possesses in itself the spring of action ; but 
that which is self-moved is imperishable. 

And finally the cultivation of the spiritual life 
exalts human nature to the region of the Divine. 
For the spirit of Man is akin to the Divine 
Spirit. 

And here this chapter might close but that it is 
natural to examine how far the considerations 
adduced as evidences, whether external or internal, 
for Immortality are found to harmonise in respect 
of the lower animals, with the probability of their 
fate if estimated, as in the last chapter, by a general 
reference to the constitution of the Universe. 

For it is always possible to take the case for 


26o 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


human Immortality and determine how far it is 
or is not applicable to the lower animals. Now, 
while the law of conservation is an argument 
suitable to the lower animals, it is evident that 
no such argument can be derived from the dignity 
or progressiveness of their nature. Similarly the 
souls of animals are immaterial and indissoluble, as 
well as human souls ; they are gifted, though in a 
limited degree, with native energy; but they possess 
and exhibit no affinity to the Godhead. The proba¬ 
ble inference would seem to be that animals are 
immortal, but not immortal in the same sense as 
men. Some characteristics of Immortality their life 
exhibits, but not all. Nor can it be urged that God 
may be reasonably expected to justify His Provi¬ 
dence to them as to mankind; for there is no sign 
that they feel the intellectual and moral difficulties 
which have so grievously embarrassed Humanity. 
A probable but limited Immortality, i.e., limited in 
the capacity for knowledge and reverence, is at the 
most all that awaits them, if it be judged by philo¬ 
sophical speculation. 

But when the thought proceeds to Christ’s revela¬ 
tion and to His express teaching, especially that 
not one sparrow falls to earth without His Father, 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


261 


and then to St. Paul’s great anticipation of a future 
in which the whole creation, not Humanity alone, 
now “made subject to vanity,” shall be enriched 
with a glorious and sacred liberty, it is an imme¬ 
diate inference that the Eternal Mercy has reserved 
some beneficent destiny for the animals. For they 
too suffer in the present life as well as men, nay, 
they suffer for the follies and cruelties of mankind; 
and the principle of Divine compensation suggests, 
if it does not compel, a belief in regeneration for 
them. 

Thus the conclusion to which the study of the 
soul in itself leads in respect of the lower animals 
harmonises with the inference already drawn from 
the constitution of the Universe. It establishes a 
probability that they are immortal, although not 
immortal in the same sense as Man. Beyond 
this probability it is difficult or impossible to go. 

But there still remains two points regarding * 
human Immortality. 

It was an old question among the Christian 
Fathers whether the Immortality of the soul 
was a quality natural and native to it, or an acqui¬ 
sition, being something imparted to it in virtue 
of its union with the spirit (7 rvevfjia) at Baptism or 


262 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


in any other way. The question may not be 

thought important, nor does it affect the consid¬ 
erations which have been urged in this essay as 

justifying or encouraging a belief in Immortality. 
Still it was the subject of differing opinions at 
various epochs of Church History. Thus on the 

one side as advocates of the soul’s natural Immor¬ 
tality are Tertullian and Origen, as advocates of 
imparted Immortality Justin Martyr (though his 
expressions are not wholly clear), Tatian, and 
Irenseus; on the one side Augustine and Gregory 
the Great, on the other Lactantius; on the one side 
Thomas Aquinas, on the other Duns Scotus. The 
defences and indeed the expositions of their 

opinions lie beyond the proper scope of this essay. 
But upon the whole the weight of authority 
inclined at all times to the doctrine of the natural 
Immortality of the soul. At last in 1513 a.d. the 
Lateran Council declared the natural Immortality 
of the soul to be an article of the Faith. Faustus 
Socinus indeed argued that the soul was naturally 
mortal, and so at a later time did Dodswell (though 
less explicitly) in his controversy with Clarke. 
But in the Catholic Church the doctrine of the 
soul’s absolute, intrinsic, natural Immortality has 



EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 2 63 

long remained unshaken. It is, as was said in the 
first chapter, the belief that is advocated in this 
essay, not so much upon distinctively Christian 
as upon general religious and philosophical grounds. 
For any supposition that the soul can or may perish 
necessarily impairs the validity of all such argu¬ 
ments as may be urged, in favour of its immortal 
destiny, from the nature of the soul itself. The 
soul is its own witness; it reveals its own Immor¬ 
tality. 

That it is difficult to define physiologically the 
character of the union between soul and body, 
or the precise manner or time in which that union 
is effected, must be admitted by all candid thinkers. 
But the beginnings of things are always difficult; 
and it is no less difficult to conceive how life 
originated in the humblest of animate beings than 
how the soul, with its vast intellectual and spiritual 
capacities, entered into union with the body of 
Man. 

The absolute intrinsic Immortality of every soul 
is the Catholic doctrine, and it is for that that this 
essay contends. 

The second question is the following: 

It is said that the arguments for the soul’s Im- 


264 THE hope of immortality 

mortality, in so far as they support its continued 
existence after death, equally support its pre¬ 
existence before its association with the body. 

Upon this point a difference would seem to 
exist between ancient and modern philosophical 
thought. 

The ancient writers who believed in the soul’s 
Immortality generally believed not only that it 
would exist after death but that it had existed 
before birth. The argument of the Pficedo , for 
instance, especially that part of it which turns 
upon the soul’s reminiscence of knowledge acquired 
in a previous state, tends to prove the pre-existence 
rather than the post-existence of the soul. Nor 
was this theory of the soul’s life absent from Jewish 
Theology; for it is implied in such a passage as that 
of the Wisdom of Solomon, “ Being good I came 
into a body undefiled,” 1 and it is expressly taught 
in the Talmud. It descended to some Christian 
theologians, eg, to Origen. In recent poetry it 
is the central thought of Wordsworth’s Ode on the 
Intimations of Immortality. 

And whatever strength there is in the primitive 
creeds of mankind may be enlisted on behalf of 

1 viii. 20. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


265 


the soul’s pre-existence; for travellers are practically 
unanimous in reporting that the belief in Immor¬ 
tality among savage races is everywhere a belief 
that the soul not only will survive death, but existed 
before birth. 

Among modern writers, influenced as they have 
been consciously or unconsciously by Christianity, 
it has been the custom to let the question of the 
soul’s pre-existence drop out of sight. A few 
thinkers, as, e.g., Fichte, have raised it more or less 
sympathetically. But whether from a dread of any 
approach to the pagan theory of metempsychosis 
or from a sense that personal responsibility is 
bound up with the limitation of the soul’s life to 
the present and the future, or from other causes, 
modern writers have in general confined themselves 
to arguing for survival after death, without much 
reference to the possible existence of the soul before 
its birth in the body. 

Yet many considerations which make for the 
one belief make for the other. The fact of imma¬ 
teriality, the fact of inherent energy, the fact of 
Divine affinity, would all suggest, if they do not 
imply, the absence of a creative point or moment 
in the history of the soul. Philosophically indeed it 


266 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


is less difficult to conceive of the soul as existing 
eternally than as coming into existence at a specified 
time for the sake of association with the body. And 
if the question of the soul’s existence were purely 
philosophical, there would seem no doubt that a 
belief in the soul’s eternity — viz., that, as it always 
will be, so it always was — recommends itself to the 
reason. 

It is evident indeed, as Dr. Martineau has ob¬ 
served, that post-existence does not prove pre-exist¬ 
ence. “ Within the limits of organic life, whose 
history consists of a cycle of chemical changes, it is 
true that birth is the invariable precursor of a series 
leading to death ; but beyond this range it cannot 
be shown that either mechanical or mental genesis 
must run its course and come to an end. What 
indeed does Newton’s first law declare, but that a 
particle once set in motion in empty space will 
continue to move in a straight line with uniform 
velocity for ever unless some external force super¬ 
venes ? ” 1 But, apart from the creative Will of God, 
it remains probable that the soul, as possessing in 
itself the strength of Immortality, had no beginning, 
as it will have no end. 

1 A Study of Religion , book iv., chap, iv., vol. ii., p. 334. 


EVIDENCES FOR THE BELIEF 


267 


Thus the argument, like all other arguments 
touching the soul, leads back to the Being of God. 

The pre-existence of the soul must remain a 
surmise, a possibility, or at the most a probability. 

Its immortal existence after death is a belief sup¬ 
ported by so many strong evidential considerations, 
upon the hypothesis of a Divine Almighty Provi¬ 
dence, that it merits to be held and followed as a 
belief and a motive in life. 

Thus it is that the consideration of Immortality is 
felt to be none other than the consideration of God 
Himself. The belief in the Being of God and the 
belief in the immortal existence of the soul are 
intimately and inextricably united. God has joined 
them together, and Man may not put them asunder. 

Upon the whole I see no convincing argument 
(in spite of much probability) for the soul's Immor¬ 
tality apart from the sublime belief in Him. 

To my mind there are but two logical positions 
which the human reason can permanently assume 
towards the complex phenomena of life. 

The one is sheer dark absolute Materialism. 

The other is Theism with its inherent probability 
of such a communication from God to Man as is 
called Revelation, and its stronger, because more 


268 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


subjective, probability of a soul other than material, 
transcending time and space and asserting its kin¬ 
ship with Heaven. 

Between these beliefs the religious spirit will not 
long hesitate to choose. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE CHRISTIAN AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 

This essay has hitherto been concerned with the 
general evidences for the Immortality of the soul. 
These are such evidences as are in the main in¬ 
dependent of any special religious belief, although 
they presuppose a spiritual attitude of mind. No 
doubt it is true that the estimate formed of these 
evidences will be, or may be, influenced by a 
particular creed. Thus to a Christian the authority 
of Christ Himself is final, — it cannot be resisted or 
disputed; and as soon as it becomes clear that He 
announced authoritatively this or that truth con¬ 
cerning Immortality, there can no more be any 
question about it. 

But it would be wrong to connect the belief in 
Immortality, or to connect it exclusively, with any 
269 


270 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


special form of creed. It is a belief natural to all 
persons who take a religious view of human nature. 
It is in fact the common property of all the great 
spiritual systems of belief in the world. 

The belief in Immortality is a philosophical as well 
as a religious doctrine. It is chiefly upon philosophi¬ 
cal grounds that the belief has been recommended 
in this essay. Yet no sooner is it accepted as a matter 
of Philosophy than it becomes stamped with a reli¬ 
gious type or character. It is in fact what religion 
makes it to be. Thus a Mohammedan, may believe 
in Immortality as well as a Christian; but he does 
not believe in the same Immortality. Immortality 
is one thing, Christian Immortality is another. 

And it is not the mere abstract doctrine but the 
Christian doctrine of Immortality which is the faith 
of Christian souls in a Christian land. This is, in 
effect, the doctrine advocated in this essay; for it 
cannot be doubted that no system of Philosophy or 
Religion has done so much to invest the thought 
of the Immortal Life with a definite consistent 
character as Christianity. St. Paul in one of his 
Epistles, speaking of his Divine Master, says that He 
“ only hath Immortality ; ” 1 and in another that He 

1 I Timothy vi. 16. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


271 


“hath abolished death and hath brought life and 
immortality (or ‘ incorruption ’) to light through the 
Gospel.” 1 Immortality, then, is the dominant note 
in the Christian Revelation. It pervades and in¬ 
fluences Christ’s whole teaching. And the Christian 
Revelation, above all other teachings, has not only 
impressed upon human minds and consciences the 
fact of personal Immortality, but has elucidated, or 
at least suggested, in various manners, what the 
nature of Immortality may be. It may be laid down, 
then, in Tennyson’s words, that “the cardinal point 
of Christianity is the Life after Death.” 2 

It is indeed the function of religious philosophy 
to create, by more or less persuasive arguments, 
a belief in Immortality; but it is the function of 
special revelations to fill up the space of the 
Immortal Life. The mere philosophical belief is 
as the outline of a picture; but it is from religion 
that the picture derives its form, colour, complete¬ 
ness, reality, truth. The Immortal Life, as regarded 
by minds of highest intellectuality and spirituality, 
is not mere existence ; it is existence characterised 
and conditioned by the Revelation of Jesus Christ. 

Christianity does not prove Immortality. It as- 

1 2 Timothy i. 10. 2 Life of Tennyson , vol. i., p. 321. 


272 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


sumes Immortality; or to speak exactly, it breathes 
a spiritual atmosphere in which the assumption of 
Immortality is felt to be natural or even necessary. 
But taking Immortality as a fact, Christianity im¬ 
presses upon it a character. 

Is it possible to determine that character? 

Immortality, as an abstract, colourless dogma, 
possesses no adequate satisfaction for mankind. 
It may be held to gratify the longing for continued 
life. But we desire to know not only that we shall 
live after death but, so far as possible, what our 
life will be, and where and under what conditions 
it will be, and how we may so acquit ourselves in 
the present as to attain the reward of felicity in the 
future. And to all such questions Jesus Christ 
affords an answer, not indeed as absolute or definite 
(at least apparently) as human curiosity is prone to 
demand, but sufficient for the conduct of life, for 
the inspiration of duty, and for the satisfaction of 
the “obstinate questionings ” which are the witnesses 
of the affinity of human nature to the Divine. 

We believe, then, not in Immortality alone, but in 
Christian Immortality. We are not philosophers 
only, or Theists; we are more than these, we are 
disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


?73 

It is important, therefore, to apprehend the special 
light of Christ’s Revelation upon the nature of Im¬ 
mortality. 

But His revelation of Immortality is only a part 
of His general Revelation. It must be interpreted 
in the same manner and spirit as any other truth 
revealed within the Gospels ; that is to say, that the 
interpretation of it must pay due regard to the char¬ 
acter of His teaching and of the record in which it 
is contained, as well as to His personal claim and 
authority in His human life. 

Now Jesus Christ was Divine but also human, 
human but also Divine. The speculations of 
recent thought upon His Nature, however little 
they may be affected by Christian orthodoxy, tend 
convergingly to the belief that He was Man and 
yet superior to Man, or in the precise words of 
the Creed, that He was “ equal to the Father as 
touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father 
as touching His Manhood.” No representation 
of His Person as solely Divine or as solely 
human has failed to end, soon or late, in con¬ 
tradiction or paradox. That it is difficult, if not 
impossible, to express the truth of His Nature in 
words must be admitted ; it is part of the difficulty 


T 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


274 

affecting the relation of Man to God in every aspect. 
But religious belief may transcend its verbal ex¬ 
pression. For if logic is the one safe guide in 
human matters, it is not so in Divine. Where 
theological truth is unattainable or incommunicable, 
it is not always in a simple positive proposition; 
it is often in the balance of two parallel and ap¬ 
parently opposed propositions, as F. W. Robertson 
pointed out long ago, that the best approximation 
to the Divine reality seems to lie. Jesus Christ 
“emptied Himself” of His Glory. What was the 
absolute nature of that self-emptying or, as the 
theological term is, Kenosis , and in what form or 
degree it is a limitation of His Omniscience, is a 
question disputed among theologians; but the ques¬ 
tion does not fall within the scope of this essay. It 
is enough to bear in mind that His Godhead, during 
the period of His human life, was “veiled in flesh.” 

Jesus Christ lived on earth the common life of 
men. There was nothing that distinguished Him 
externally from His contemporaries. No fact is 
clearer in the Gospels than that men and women 
who knew Him, consorted with Him, listened to 
His teachings, and were the recipients of His 
charities, might remain unconscious, and, as it 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


275 


seems, wholly unsuspicious of any characteristic 
Divine prerogative attaching to His Person. Apart 
from sin, and perhaps from sickness, which is the 
shadow of sin, He was subject to human infirmities. 
He was hungry and thirsty and weary, as at Jacob’s 
well. He shed tears as He drew near to the grave 
of Lazarus. In Gethsemane He prayed that the 
cup of agony might be taken from Him, and it was 
not so taken ; He drank it to the dregs. 

But the point is that His doctrine, like His life, 
though essentially Divine, was yet in a sense 
conditioned by His humanity. He used the current 
language of the world. It was indeed impossible 
that He should speak otherwise; there is no celestial 
language upon earth. The verities of the spiritual 
Immortal Life are in themselves neither definable 
in human words nor intelligible to human apprehen¬ 
sions. Our Lord sought to recommend them to the 
souls and consciences of His hearers not in precise 
scientific phraseology, but far more impressively, 
by figure and parable and allegory. His language 
exhibits no attempt at representing Divine things as 
they are in themselves. He taught them in such a 
manner as the world was able to understand; and 
the result has been that His teaching has dominated 


276 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

and determined the speculations of most religious 
thinkers upon the invisible world. 

All or nearly all that He said about the future 
life is found to be figurative. Parables such as 
that of Dives and Lazarus, pictorial scenes such 
as that of the Advent of the Son of Man in His 
glory, are far removed from the accuracy of scientific 
literalism. They bring home great and general 
truths to the heart of the world ; but to press every 
detail, to insist upon every clause and word of them 
as literally exact, is to mistake the whole character of 
His teaching. It is difficult to estimate how great 
is the harm that the Church has suffered from the 
habit of treating poetry as prose, and imagery as 
science in Theology. But if it be admitted, as in 
fact is evident, that our Lord, in delineating the 
spiritual or Immortal Life which He knew intimately, 
and which no one could know as He knew it, made 
use of such language as was impotent to express it 
in its reality, though it was the only language which 
He could use and His audience comprehend, there 
can be no doubt as to the need of caution and 
discrimination in laying stress upon this or that 
particular word of His teaching. 

And further, the language of our Lord has been 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


2 77 


transmitted through the Gospels to a late age by the 
recognised means and agencies of tradition. He 
spoke, even upon the supreme matters, in the ordi¬ 
nary converse of life. His words were not taken down 
by shorthand writers. The report of them was not 
corrected by Himself : so far as appears, it was not 
referred on any occasion to His authority. The doc¬ 
trine of Inspiration is among doctrines one of the 
most difficult; it has never been subjected to defini¬ 
tion by the Church; and any student of Theology 
who has reflected upon it knows that it is prac¬ 
tically impossible to define it in such terms as do 
not at once incur reasonable criticism. It is natural 
to believe that “ holy men of God spake as they 
were moved by the Holy Ghost.” The Divine 
Spirit, Whose office it is to inspire human minds 
with the knowledge of Truth, rested upon the 
literary labours of the Evangelists. Without His in¬ 
spiration the Gospels would not have been what 
they are; nay, they would not have been at all. 
But the Evangelists do not claim, and the Gospels, 
if honestly treated, do not exhibit, a character of 
complete immunity from fault or error. 

It would seem that the Evangelists wrote much 
as others write. They were not all eye-witnesses of 


278 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


the scenes which they commemorate. They were 
often dependent upon information. One of them — 
St. Luke — describes his manner of arriving by 
inquiry at the truth of events lying beyond his 
personal knowledge; it is much as any careful 
and conscientious historian would proceed in com¬ 
posing a secular narrative. Another is himself the 
subject of dispute; it is not easy to say for certain 
who he was, and indeed if the truth be told, the 
Gospel called St. John’s looks more like the work of 
a pupil faithfully recording, to the best of his memory, 
a master’s oral teaching — as the treatises of Aristotle 
are no doubt in substance the notes of his pupils — 
than the work of the master himself. 

And the Gospels themselves support this theory 
of their origin. They are not always precise or 
coincident or uniform. The general impression 
which they create — the impression of a unique 
Personality — is the same everywhere; but the 
details of time and place and circumstance vary. 
The same conversations are related, but with slight 
differences. The same incidents occur, but the 
setting is changed. Everywhere the Gospels pro¬ 
duce the effect of honest testimonies given by 
sincere but variously situated observers or narrators 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


2 79 

under the ordinary conditions of human knowledge. 
Nothing in them is stereotyped, nothing formalised. 
They are spontaneous, not mechanical; they have 
grown, they are not made. Nobody who is a 
capable judge of literature doubts that they are 
true ; but their truth lies in the substance, not in 
the letter; and as authorities they are far more 
impressive by their discrepancy than if they were 
only so many copies of the same original. 

All this is an argument for treating the Gospels 
and the other Books of the New Testament in their 
due measure as evidences for certain broad general 
conclusions respecting Immortality rather than for 
any precise and minute theory of Life Immortal. 
And this is the treatment which would appear to 
accord most strictly with the singular reticence 
which our Lord, as will be seen presently, never 
failed to observe in speaking of the world behind 
the veil. For His object was not to satisfy 
curiosity; it was to stimulate and invigorate the 
spiritual life. 

Now the Christian Revelation, as expressed in the 
Gospels, may be said to affect both the evidence for 
Immortality and also the conception or estimate of 
the Immortal Life. It not only inclines and per- 


280 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


suades men to believe that they are Immortal, or, in 
better words, creates a consciousness of Immortality; 
but it shows, within certain limits, what Immortality 
as a state may be properly conceived to be. Both 
these are matters which demand consideration in 
this chapter. 

Jesus Christ, it has been already said, did not 
prove Immortality. There is no record of any 
occasion on which he discussed whether it was 
probable or not. He took it for granted, as He took 
the Being of God for granted. It was not an 
inference, but an axiom of His Gospel. No doubt 
He was justified in assuming it because His hearers 
were disposed to admit it. And an assumption, 
when it is so made, is often more potent, as it is 
more striking, than proof; for a proof is in general 
a witness to difference of opinion; but an assumption 
represents unanimity. Critics of the sacred writings 
have sometimes imagined that whatever the writers 
did not prove, or did not assert, they did not believe. 
The fact is rather the reverse: whatever is proved 
has been disputed; whatever is asserted has been 
denied. It is not so much the assertions as the 
assumptions of the New Testament that represent 
conviction. For what nobody questions everybody 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


281 


believes. Hence the main articles of the Christian 
Creed, and especially the Divinity of Our Lord, are 
seldom enunciated in the New Testament; but they 
are always and everywhere implied. Jesus Christ 
made the Immortal, or, as He preferred to call it, 
“the Eternal Life,” an assumption, not a conclusion, 
of His teaching. He started from it; He did not 
arrive at it by argument. It was to Him the basis 
of religion. Upon it rested the superstructure of 
Christian belief and Christian practice. If it were 
not true, then all the motives and obligations of 
Christian duty would fall to the ground. But Jesus 
Christ’s method of treating Immortality was only 
one instance of His general way of teaching. It 
was not His wont to reason about truth. He taught 
“as one having authority.” They who believed His 
Gospel believed not because they were convinced 
by the validity of the logical evidences submitted 
to their judgment, but because they knew Him and 
knew that He would not tell them a lie. 

It is well to understand what is the exact force 
of the evidence which Jesus Christ by this method 
of teaching could afford to the fact and nature of 
Immortality. 

In the East knowledge does not proceed in 


282 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


the same manner as in the West. In the Western 
world it advances by argument. In the Eastern 
world it advances by authority. Revelation is the 
voice of authority. It is in its nature didactic 
and declaratory. It does not persuade, it does not 
convince, but it compels. A prophet speaking in 
the name of God does not use syllogisms ; he does 
not reason from step to step, like a philosopher; he 
does not appeal to human intelligence or informa¬ 
tion ; but he proclaims what he knows to be truth, 
and he proclaims it with such intense personal 
emphasis that men must needs listen to his words 
and obey his admonitions. This is the regular 
method of Oriental teaching; it is not argumenta¬ 
tive, but authoritative. The proof of the teaching 
lies not in the weight of external evidences, it lies in 
the teaching itself; the teacher declares truth, and 
declares it upon his personal testimony; and the 
conscience of his hearers makes answer that his 
declaration is true. In a word, all such teaching 
is an appeal not to the reason, but to the con¬ 
science of mankind. 

The authoritative teaching of Jesus Christ is 
naturally elevated above all other such teaching as 
rests upon authority. It is higher in proportion 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


283 


as His essential Nature is higher than human. For 
if He was (as He professed to be) the Son of God, if 
He was One with God, if He came down from God, 
if it was His merciful Will to teach Mankind, at the 
cost of personal infinite suffering, truths which it 
was impossible that they should know unless from 
Him, then it follows that no voice which has 
been heard upon earth has spoken like His in 
the accents of Heaven, nor has it been given to any 
child of Man as to Him to reveal the things which eye 
has not seen nor ear heard nor the heart conceived. 

Thus it is that Jesus Christ has by His Gospel 
borne the supreme witness to the soul’s Immortality. 
The doctrine of Immortality has become a Christian 
doctrine, it has been taken up into the heritage 
of Christendom; wherever thoughtful cultivated 
men believe in Immortality, they believe in it now 
chiefly, or it may be even exclusively, because 
He believed it and taught it and lived^ it. 

For there are two ways in which a teacher, 
speaking with authority, may produce or enforce, 
even among minds addicted to criticism, a per¬ 
suasion of the truth which he announces. He 
may recommend the truth by the lucidity and in¬ 
tensity of his conviction, or he may recommend 
it by the impressiveness of his example. 


284 THE hope of immortality 

In both these ways Jesus Christ, above all other 
teachers, enforced the belief in Immortality. 

It has been shown in the second chapter of this 
essay how great was the historical difficulty of clearing 
this belief from the material grossness which so long 
adhered to it. To conceive of the soul as spiritual, 
i.e.y as free from all alloy of matter or substance, has 
been one of the hardest tasks of the human intellect. 
Yet it is only when the conception of the soul is 
so purged, so etherealised, that the belief in its 
immortal being becomes not merely possible but 
natural. The great step, then, in recommending 
Immortality as a belief is to purge the belief of all 
that materialises or debases it. And Jesus Christ 
was the first teacher who realised and exhibited the 
pure spirituality of the soul. 

In order to understand His conception of the soul 
and of the soul’s destiny, it is necessary to examine 
the remarkable phrase which was often upon His 
lips, as it was also in his heart, “the Eternal Life.” 
To Him this was not something vague or fortuitous, 
but perfectly definite, not merely a life, but the life, 
“the Eternal Life.” To Him it was the sole true 
life, the reality, the substance of which the earthly 
physical life was, at best, but a shadow. To Him 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 285 

it was the life of one who lived in conscious rela¬ 
tion to God. And this life — this Eternal Life — 
was the life of the soul. 

It is in St. John’s Gospel that the Eternal Life is 
set forth most vividly. That Gospel is the most 
spiritual of the Gospels. It is in a special sense the 
Gospel of the Lord’s Divinity. It dwells, as it were, 
in an atmosphere of eternity. It is instinct with the 
thought of “the Eternal Life.” 

Everywhere it is “the Eternal Life” which is 
represented as the special boon of Christianity, the 
unique gift of Jesus Christ to His disciples. What 
“ the Eternal Life ” in its nature is will be con¬ 
sidered hereafter. One of the greatest commen¬ 
tators upon St. John’s writings has justly said that 
the Eternal Life is “not an endless duration of 
being, but being of which time is not a measure.” 1 
For the present it is enough to lay down that it 
is the life of the soul, and therefore pre-eminently 
of the spirit. The spiritual life and the Immortal 
Life are one. “The Eternal Life ” is the perfection 
of the spiritual or Immortal Life. It is the perfected 
life not of the body, but of the soul. It was the 
office of Jesus Christ to reveal this life to the world 

1 Westcott, The Epistles of St. John , p. 215. 


286 THE hope of immortality 

He revealed it by His teaching and by His example. 
His disciples not only heard it from His lips, but saw 
it in His life. 

“The Eternal Life ” — so He said — was His gift. 
It was the gift which He alone could bestow. 
In His final prayer of consecration He uses these 
words, “ Father, the hour is come ; glorify Thy Son, 
that Thy Son also may glorify Thee; as Thou hast 
given Him power over all flesh, that He should give 
eternal life to as many as Thou hast given Him.” 1 

“ The Eternal Life ” is the consciousness of the 
Divine Nature, the communion with the Divine 
Spirit. “This is life eternal,” said the Lord (i.e., 
“the Eternal Life”), “that they might know Thee 
the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou 
hast sent .” 2 Great and solemn are these words. 
How could He have spoken of knowing God and 
knowing Himself as the conditions of “the Eter¬ 
nal Life” if he had not wished to “make Himself 
equal with God ” ? But, at least, the words show 
clearly that “the Eternal Life” is a spiritual 
state. 

Yet again “the Eternal Life,” as Our Lord de¬ 
clared it, is dependent upon a certain sacramental 


1 St. John xvii. 2. 


2 Ibid. xvii. 3. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


287 


relation to Himself. He spoke of it in the mysti¬ 
cal language which expressed the intimate union 
between Christians and Himself. “Verily, verily, I 
say unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of 
Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you. 
Whoso eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath 
eternal life ; and I will raise him up at the last day.” 1 

“The Eternal Life” is thus the note of all His 
teaching. It is to Him that men come to ask how 
they may win or inherit that life. He holds in His 
hands the keys of that life. He announces its 
conditions and capacities. It is the secret of His 
Incarnation. It is the benediction of His Spirit. 
He came into the world that He might impart it to 
mankind. And when He returns as Judge He will 
award it as the recompense of faith and virtue. 
“ For God so loved the world, that He gave His 
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in 
Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” 
(i.e.y “ Eternal Life ”). 2 

It is important that the bearing of this doctrine 
upon the native Immortality of the soul should be 
rightly estimated. The Immortal life is the preroga¬ 
tive of all men. The Eternal Life is the prerogative 


* St. John vi. 53, 54. 


2 Ibid. iii. 16. 


288 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


of some, but not of all. It is only by a proper 
discipline of the soul that Man becomes endowed 
with “the Eternal Life.” 

Man is an immortal being. The soul that is in 
him cannot die. But the assurance of Immortality, 
the benediction of Immortality, lies in the culti¬ 
vation of the highest part of human nature, i.e.> of 
the soul, and pre-eminently of the spirit. When the 
soul is enlightened by grace, elevated through 
prayer, and disciplined in sanctity, it attains to its 
own true and perfect life. That life is “ the Life 
Eternal.” And to him who has once apprehended 
its secret and realised its beatitude, it becomes 
incomparably better and holier than any boon that 
the world can give or take away: it is the true life, 
there is no other life than this. 

This is the great revelation of Jesus Christ. He 
compelled men to believe in Immortality as the 
supreme truth of their nature by creating in them 
the sense of a life that could not die. 

The conception of a spiritual or Eternal Life as 
revealed by Jesus Christ descended naturally to the 
Epistles of the New Testament. It is always 
regarded as the privilege of Christian faith. If all 
the souls of men were immortal, as religion taught, 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 289 

it was they alone who had become members of 
Christ’s body that felt this Immortality as an essen¬ 
tial law of their being. 

Thus St. Paul writes to the Romans, “If Christ 
be in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the 
spirit is life because of righteousness; ” 1 to the 
Galatians, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless 
I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me ;” 2 to the 
Colossians, “ Christ in you, the hope of glory; ” 3 
to Timothy, in a passage already quoted, that our 
Saviour Jesus Christ “hath abolished death and 
hath brought life and immortality to light through 
the gospel.” 4 

It is always the same thought which occurs, 
though in different aspects, that Jesus Christ has 
revealed in His Gospel a new life — a life that is 
spiritual, immortal and Divine. 

It is St. Paul’s habit in addressing the Christian 
Churches whose founder he had been or whose 
counsellor he was, to employ an expression of 
which the significance is apt to be obscured, like 
much else in the Bible, by familiarity. The expres¬ 
sion is, “in Christ.” A study of his Epistles will 

1 Romans viii. 10. 2 Galatians ii. 20. 

3 Colossians i. 27. 4 2 Timothy i. 10. 

u 


290 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


show how constantly he so writes. All the relations 
and activities of the Christian life — its hopes and 
anxieties, its joys and disappointments, birth, mar¬ 
riage, education, business, amusement, society, 
suffering, nay, death itself, are regarded as taking 
place “in Christ/’ Christ is, as it were, the atmo¬ 
sphere in which the Christian “lives and moves and 
has his being.” And this life “in Christ,” though 
realised or initiated upon earth, is yet essentially a 
superhuman, supernatural life. For to be “in 
Christ,” to be one with Christ, is, as St. Paul held, 
to possess the secret of eternity. 

Jesus Christ, then, revealed Man to himself. He 
saw and declared what was Man’s true nature. He 
drew him out of low carnal desires and appetites, 
and set his feet upon the high ground of eternity. 
“Alone in all history,” as Emerson says, “He esti¬ 
mated the greatness of Man.” 1 And, as in Revela¬ 
tion generally, so in this, its paramount article, 
the conscience of Humanity made an immediate 
response to the appeal of the Divine Master. When 
He pronounced the Immortality of the human spirit, 
when He declared the necessity of so cultivating 

1 Address delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, 
Cambridge, Massachusetts. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


291 


and disciplining the spirit that it should ascend to 
the realisation of its own eternal and unfading 
power, the men and women who sat at His feet 
became conscious of a new sentiment that was itself 
an inspiration. 

It was said of Lord Chatham that he breathed a 
new spirit into the people of England. His pres¬ 
ence inspired them; his voice was as a trumpet-call 
in their ears. They who heard him became new 
men; they felt themselves capable of nobler and 
more exalted actions. His words evoked a burning 
patriotism. The patriotic sentiment existed already 
in their hearts, but it was he who could give it life, 
energy and virtue. Similarly (if it be not irreverent 
to make the comparison), but in a far higher sense, 
did Jesus Christ evoke the sentiment of Immortality. 
He taught men to know themselves — to know their 
true nature. Without His teaching men felt and 
owned themselves to be Immortal; but their Im¬ 
mortality was not the paramount fact of their being; 
it was in the Gospel that human Immortality 
assumed such importance as to overshadow all the 
interests and ambitions of the present life. 

It is thus that Jesus Christ, above all other 
teachers, has stamped the fact of Immortality upon 


292 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


the heart and conscience of the world. He took 
the Immortal or Eternal Life as the basis of His 
revelation. He laid His finger upon Man’s spiritual 
faculty as the seat and source of Immortality. He 
showed how that faculty might be raised to its true 
and rightful supremacy in human nature. And He 
made men feel that it was in virtue of their capacity 
for “ the Eternal Life ” that they stood in the re¬ 
lation of closest affinity to their Maker. And with 
His conception of “the Eternal Life” agreed His 
supreme sense of the value attaching to the soul as 
contrasted with all external joys or endowments. 
This, as the highest point of all teaching in regard to 
the soul has been set forth in the second chapter of 
this essay, where the history of the belief in Immor¬ 
tality was considered. Jesus Christ changed, as it 
were, the centre of gravity in human nature by in¬ 
sisting upon the awful and unique moment of the 
soul. For when He asked, “ What shall it profit a 
man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his 
own soul ? or what shall a man give in exchange 
for his soul?” or again when He bade His disciples 
fear not one whose power was limited to killing the 
body, but him alone who had power to kill the soul, 
His words could not fail, nor did they fail in fact, to 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


2 93 


create and intensify the consciousness of a spiritual 
life, or a life of the soul, so vital and valuable 
that in comparison with it the bodily life became as 
nothing. And it was this realisation of the soul’s 
eternal value that was felt to be the most impressive 
witness to Immortality. 

But it is not only by the strong conviction of 
the Eternal Life as the great reality, or even by the 
insistence upon the paramount dignity of the soul 
as the seat or centre of that life, that Jesus Christ 
revealed eternity to mankind. There is a teaching 
more impressive than any words. It is the teaching 
of example; and He not only preached the Eternal 
Life, but He lived it. He was Himself His Revelation. 
He was the Way, and the Truth, but above all the Life. 
The greatest of all witnesses to Immortality is not 
Christ’s teaching, nor His creative work in the Church 
of the ages, nor even His Resurrection : it is Christ. 

The argument of His example may be put in this 
way : 

Jesus Christ was Man. He was Man as truly as 
any human being that breathes. He assumed 
human nature in its integrity. Although He 
ennobled that nature by its union with Divinity, it 
remained essentially human. 


294 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


But Humanity is a unit. It deserves to be regarded 
as a whole. It possesses its own corporate character, 
its own collective individuality. All men, therefore, 
in the essential points of human nature, are alike. 
Differences of time, race, locality, &c., are accidental; 
the similarity is vital. It follows that any attain¬ 
ment or achievement of one man elevates mankind. 
Whatever Man has done, Man may aspire to do. 
Whatever Man has been, Man may hope to become. 
The most convincing proof of human spirituality is 
that one human being should have lived a Life 
entirely spiritual. And if that Life was the highest 
ever lived upon earth, it is sufficient in itself to 
declare and demonstrate the supremacy of the 
spiritual element in Humanity. For spirituality, as 
has been said, is the promise and the witness of the 
Life Immortal and Eternal. 

Alone among the sons of men Jesus Christ lived 
upon earth “the Eternal Life” in its complete 
integrity. He is therefore the one man whose life 
affords a perfect assurance of Immortality. 

To estimate His Divine Life in any full measure 
would be alien from the purpose of this essay. But 
no one will deny that its characteristic was spiri¬ 
tuality. It was not, like other lives, broken and 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


2 95 


marred, but a seamless robe, perfect in its com¬ 
munion with the Divine. 

Jesus Christ cared for one object uniquely. His 
pure soul was not distracted by conflicting am¬ 
bitions. The common interests of life — wealth, 
rank, culture, advancement — were little in His eyes. 
He was poor, homeless and alone. The one am¬ 
bition of His Life was goodness. “ My meat,” He 
said, “is to do the Will of Him that sent Me and to 
finish His work.” 1 He came to save the world. 

It is this absolute devotion to a spiritual object 
which separates His Life from all other lives in the 
world’s history. His is the one completely religious 
life. It is the one life in which the true end of 
human being is pursued without any hesitancy, 
without any failing, from first to last. 

When we consider what that Life is as it appears to 
us who can look upon it only through the darkening 
vista of centuries, we can faintly realise how His 
intimate friends, who were its eye-witnesses, must 
have been moved and influenced by it. It is so 
different from most human lives, though common 
eyes could see no difference. It is a Life unearthly, 
Divine. It is holy and immaculate. The taint of 


1 St. John iv. 34. 


296 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

sin, that ever clings about the best and saintliest of 
human characters, is impotent to touch Him; it 
cannot rest upon Him, cannot come nigh Him ; His 
Presence forbids it, and it is as though, while walk¬ 
ing on earth, He breathed the air, the pure and 
serene atmosphere that lies around the throne of 
God in Heaven. 

What, then, was the effect of that Divine Life 
upon those who knew and loved it ? 

It was to produce an absolute conviction of 
Immortality. 

The faithful friends of Christ’s Life could not 
believe that it ended when His body was laid 
in the grave. They felt that He had displayed 
before human eyes the witness of a spiritual and 
ageless existence. And they humbly hoped that, as 
partakers of His Nature, they would, according to 
His promise, share His Immortality. 

The late Master of Balliol puts in beautiful words 
the influence of such a Life as Jesus Christ’s upon 
the affectionate and appreciative hearts of His dis¬ 
ciples. “The belief in a future life,” he says, “is 
not derived from Revelation, though greatly 
strengthened by it. It is the growing sense of 
human nature respecting itself. And this sense 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


2 97 


of a future life and judgment to come has been 
so quickened in us by Christianity that it may be 
said almost to have been created by it. It is the 
witness of Christ Himself, than which to the 
Christian no assurance can be greater. He who 
meditates on this Divine Life in the brief narra¬ 
tive which has been preserved of it, will find the 
belief in another world come again to him when 
many physical and metaphysical proofs are begin¬ 
ning to be as broken reeds. He will find more 
than enough to balance the difficulties of the 
manner ‘how’ or the time ‘when.’ He will 
find, as he draws nearer to Christ, a sort of 
impossibility of believing otherwise.” 1 

But the eye-witnesses of Christ’s Life realised not 
only that He was Immortal, but that they were 
themselves Immortal too. As they looked upon 
“the Eternal Life” manifested in Him and saw it 
to consist in His purity, His spirituality, His com¬ 
munion with God, His perfect obedience to the 
Divine Will, it dawned upon them that they too, 
in such measure as they drew near to Him, would 
become capable of such an “ Eternal Life ” as His. 

1 Quoted by Dr. Salmond, The Christian Doctrine of Immortality , 
P- 393- 


298 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


For “the Eternal Life” was not only His posses¬ 
sion ; it was His gift. And he could give it in 
virtue of His relation to the whole human family. 

In Christian Theology that relation has been 
often drawn out in rather precise and definite 
language. It follows in the main the lines of St. 
Paul’s original argument in the 15th chapter of the 
first Epistle to the Corinthians. It need not be 
here considered except in so far as it bears upon 
the witness of Christ’s Person to the doctrine of 
human Immortality. 

Christ, it may be said, is the archetypal man. He 
is, in St. Paul’s words, “the second Adam,” i.e., He 
stands to all Humanity in a similar or parallel 
relation to that in which the first Adam stands to 
the same Humanity. In more precise language, as 
the heritage of Adam’s sin passed by the law of 
Nature to all Adam’s posterity, so to the same 
posterity by the same law of Nature passes the 
heritage of Christ’s perfect spirituality. “As in Adam 
all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” 

St. Paul confines his argument to the Resurrec¬ 
tion ; but it is equally true of Immortality. The 
peculiar relation of Jesus Christ to the human 
family creates the probability — it may almost be 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


299 


called the certainty — that, if He established His 
own Immortality, He established it not for Him¬ 
self alone but for all who are participant in the 
nature that He took upon Himself. 

Jesus Christ, then, by His personal example, 
revealed the Immortal, or, more properly, the 
Eternal Life as the prerogative of human nature. 
Living Himself, as a man, a life that was instinc¬ 
tively felt to be incapable of death, He imprinted 
upon mankind the strong assurance that the soul of 
Man could not perish, but should live eternally. 
“The Eternal Life” is the perfection of Immor¬ 
tality. It is the Immortal Life spent in the 
consciousness of God. It is — if an inadequate 
illustration may be forgiven, where none could 
be adequate — it is to mere unsanctified or un¬ 
spiritualised Immortality as a life enriched with 
the graces, embellishments and dignities of culture 
is to the life of primitive barbarism. It is the sole 
true or perfect life. It is the life which alone 
realises Man’s proper nature. “ The Eternal Life ” 
is the spiritual Immortal Life in its highest form. 

And this was the Life which Jesus Christ lived 
upon earth. He lived it upon the earth; but it 
was an unearthly life, as it rose above the material 


3 °° 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


circumstances of common Humanity. He lived, 
as it were, in the clear air of a mountain-height, 
while others, living at its feet, were in mist and 
darkness. Upon Him, and upon Him alone among 
the sons of men, the light of Heaven shone un- 
cloudedly. And so it was given to Him to teach 
the world that the true life of Man consists not in 
the “ things that he possesseth,” nor in aught that is 
carnal or sensuous, but in peace and purity and 
communion with God. In a word, Jesus Christ 
lived absolutely and uniformly the life which men 
live partially and fitfully, if they live it at all. His 
Life was the actual manifestation of the Divine 
Nature to human eyes. Thus He could say, “ He 
that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” 1 But as 
God is Spirit, the Divine Life is wholly spiritual, 
and the Life which is wholly spiritual is immortal; 
it cannot die. 

Thus the testimony of Jesus Christ to Immor¬ 
tality is the testimony of His teaching and of His 
example. But it is by His example that He taught 
most powerfully. It has been the Will of God to 
regenerate the world by the exhibition of a Divine 
Character. Jesus Christ in His very Nature is the 

1 St. John xiv. 9. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


3 °i 


source of the highest beliefs and aspirations of 
Humanity. Men believe in Immortality because 
they believe in Him. It is the privilege, as has 
been already said, of sanctified souls, wherever they 
occur, to create a belief in their own Immortality. 
They possess in themselves the secret of Eternal Life. 
They reveal a potency transcending and surviving 
experience. The human mind in the observation 
of such souls feels an instinctive, ineradicable 
assurance that they pass through the gate of death 
into a larger and more spiritual existence. And of 
such souls Jesus Christ as Man is the chief. 

But when it is admitted that the Life of Jesus is 
the surest witness of eternity, it remains to consider 
and, as far as possible, to determine what was the 
nature of His teaching in regard to the future life. 
For not only did He assume human Immortality 
and constitute it as the basis of His Revelation, 
but He showed in some sense what the Immortal 
or Eternal Life would be. Here and there in the 
New Testament, and in the Gospels especially, are 
suggestive hints and intimations — sidelights thrown, 
as it were, upon the future of souls ; and to gather 
these up and compare and interpret them is part of 
the true work of Christian exegesis. 


3 02 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


Revelation, then, affects both the evidence for 
Immortality and also the conception of the Im¬ 
mortal Life. 

It is necessary, indeed, according to the principle 
already laid down, to observe great caution in draw¬ 
ing inferences from scattered phrases and passages 
even of our Lord’s own teaching. And not only 
so; but His teaching upon futurity must be treated 
as a whole. Any exaggeration or disproportion of 
one part may mar the whole picture. We will try 
to be faithful to His words. 

Immortality is the prerogative of Man as Man. It 
is an element of the dignity attaching to human 
nature as being made in the image of the Godhead. 
Our Lord in one memorable passage deduces it 
from the relation of God as Himself Immortal to 
His creatures. “ God is not a God of the dead, but 
of the living, for all live unto Him.” 1 

Immortality (so far as experience tells) begins 
at birth. “The Eternal Life” is the perfect real¬ 
isation of Immortality. It is the immortal Life 
as lived in conscious intimate relation to God. It 
begins not at birth but at baptism. “ The Eternal 
Life” as revealed by Christ does not begin at death 
1 St. Luke xx. 38. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


303 


or after death. He speaks of “having” or “not 
having” the Eternal Life as a present reality. No 
doubt, as that life is itself the evidence of Immor¬ 
tality, it must be conceived as transcending death ; 
it is immortal, it is perpetual; but it does not begin 
at death; it begins, or it may begin, here and now. 
As Man’s Immortality, so too his “ Eternal Life ” is 
not only future, but present. 

It is true, as will presently appear, that death breaks 
down the sensuous barriers which cramp and confine 
the pure activity of the spirit during the period of 
the present earthly life. The spirit of one in whom 
“ the Eternal Life ” is realised becomes at death 
emancipated and ennobled. It enters upon the 
future with new powers. In its state of felicity it must 
be regarded as attaining after death to visions, revela¬ 
tions, enjoyments, ecstasies of which it is incapable, 
or at the most only in part capable, during life. 

It may be said in general that Protestant Theology 
has tended to make too much of death. There is 
no warrant in Holy Scripture for the assumption 
that death is an absolute dividing-line between one 
state and another; still less, that on one side of the 
line all is preparation, and on the other all is 
recompense or penalty. The Christian view of 


3°4 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


death is not that it is the end of life, but that it is 
an event— the most important of all events — in life. 

For if it be true that “the Eternal Life ” begins in 
this life, not less true is it that the life which is the 
opposite of the eternal — the life which is the profa¬ 
nation of the spiritual part of Man’s nature, as “ the 
Eternal Life ” is its consecration — begins in this life ; 
and death does not make an absolute abrupt change 
in human nature or in the relation of human nature 
to the Divine ; it is not the cessation of life, but its 
continuation, only in immaterial or purely spiritual 
conditions. 

What, then, is the change effected by death in 
human nature ? 

According to the Christian view the body perishes 
or is dissolved at death ; the soul survives. It sur¬ 
vives in all its powers, intellectual, moral and spirit¬ 
ual. It carries with it into futurity the weight of its 
guilt and shame and suffering; it carries also its pre¬ 
rogative of duty achieved and character disciplined 
by patience and faith won at the foot of the Cross. 

It is because death does not in a moment reverse 
or undo the effect of the earthly life that that life 
gains inexpressible importance. Although it would 
be wrong, upon the argument of this essay, to 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


305 

emphasise particular points in our Lord’s Revela¬ 
tion of Immortality, there can be no doubt that He 
taught the supreme value of the present life as 
affecting the future destiny of mankind. To Him 
the one thing hateful, the one thing fatal, was sin ; 
but sin was a taint contracted in the present life ; 
and to purge away the taint of sin was a task so 
difficult as to demand a Divine Sacrifice. No doubt 
it was in His power to announce an immediate 
blessing, as to the dying thief on the Cross, to one 
who placed an implicit faith in His Divinity. Such 
a blessing so announced is infinitely precious, as it 
forbids the shutting of the door of hope against any 
sinner; but it stands alone in the New Testament; 
it does not contravene the general Divine law of 
dealing with souls. 

Jesus Christ laid down the principle of retribution. 
He taught that sin in its nature implied and involved 
punishment. Punishment must attend evil, as the 
shadow attends a man. “The soul that sinneth 
it shall die.” If it is not always apparent in this 
life that suffering is the necessary result of sin, it 
is because in this life there are temporal conditions 
interposing between cause and consequence in the 
Providential order. But it is as sure as the sequence 


x 


3°6 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


*of night upon day that every violation of the Divine 
law carries in itself an ultimate pain; it must be 
purged away by fire. 

For sin, as Jesus Christ viewed it, is not mere 
failure, misfortune or error, not mere human 
infirmity, a mark for tolerance or compassion 
(although this view of it is not so much erroneous 
as inadequate), it is an affront to the Majesty of 
God; and, as being such, it excites in a pure and 
righteous mind — and how much more in the Divine 
Mind!—a sentiment of indignation or abhorrence, 
a burning flame which cannot be quenched until the 
sin is done away. And Jesus Christ associated the 
law of the Divine Justice with an event which 
should be the consummation of the world’s History 
and the vindication of God’s Providence, viz., His 
own future Advent in Glory. “ The Son of Man shall 
come in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him.” 
Then shall the sentence of eternal felicity or eternal 
punishment be spoken to “ all nations.” Then shall 
the severance of the sheep from the goats take its 
effect. That the ground of reward shall be charity 
and the ground of condemnation shall be hardness 
of heart is well known : it accords with the Chris¬ 
tian estimate of righteousness and sin as the two 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


307 


essential factors in human life; but, however 
pictorial the scene may be as portrayed in the Gos¬ 
pel, it brings out in strong light that it is for the 
“deeds done in the body” that men shall be judged 
at the Judgment Seat of Christ. 

Beyond the declaration of retributory Immortality, 
beyond the declaration of the paramount moral 
character attaching to human life, it does not appear 
to me that the words of our Lord may justly be taken 
as reaching. The imagination of physical horrors in 
the unseen world belongs to His followers in later 
ages but not to Him ; it is Theology, it is not the 
Gospel. It is a sore pity that theologians should 
have imported their hatred or their spite into His 
Revelation. They have forgotten that He spoke “in 
parables,” that He made use of metaphorical and 
tropical language, that it was His intention to express 
the awful significance of human life, human sin and 
human destiny, by a few broad emphatic touches, 
but not in detail. 

After all, His language must be read in the light 
of common sense — nay, I would rather say, of 
Divine charity. Revelation informs, it does not 
crush, the moral consciousness of Humanity. God 
is—He must be — better than His children. 


3°8 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


“That one unquestioned text we read 
All doubt beyond, all fear above, 

Nor crackling pile, nor cursing creed 
Can burn or blot it: God is LOVE.” 1 

To come back to the teaching of Jesus Christ : It 
is evident that, while He asserted a difference in the 
future destinies of the good and the evil, and this 
a difference conditioned by their human lives, He 
observed a singular reticence in His delineations of 
the future invisible life, whether of suffering or of 
felicity. Nothing in the Gospels is more striking 
than His constant reserve upon the matters which 
He might perhaps have been expected to elucidate. 
Other teachers of religion — Mohammed, especially— 
chose to present the future fate of souls in colours 
the most vivid and impressive. But Jesus Christ 
seemed expressly to aim at subordinating the natural 
curiosity of men respecting the future to practical 
immediate interests and duties of the present. 

It is possible, I think, to suggest a reason for this 
reserve. When the future life engrosses and absorbs 
the thoughts of the world, men are apt to become 
neglectful of common obligations. In the Epistles 
of the New Testament, St. Paul, who believed in the 


O. W. Holmes. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


309 


near approach of the Day of Judgment, is careful to 
warn his Christian converts against the disturbing 
and distracting nature of such a belief; he urges it 
habitually as a motive, not to extravagance or fanat¬ 
icism, but to a disciplined self-command and self- 
control. There were critical periods of the Middle 
Ages when nations flung aside the restraints of order 
and morality under the conviction that the day of 
the Lord was at hand. Our Lord’s express warning 
that He would come “as a thief in the night ” was 
plainly intended to create vigilance, but to prohibit 
excitement. “ Of that day and that hour knoweth 
no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, 
neither the Son, but the Father.” 1 The sober 
practical performance of duty in the visible life as 
a preparation for the invisible is the temper char¬ 
acteristic of Christianity. 

Now if our Lord had willed to set forth in vivid 
detail the whole scope and manner and condition of 
the future life, the effect would have been to over¬ 
shadow in men’s eyes the present life, to make it 
seem insignificant, indeed contemptible, and to pro¬ 
duce in men a wholly unpractical habit of mind. 
They would have lived as enthusiasts or as hermits, 


1 St. Mark xiii. 32. 


3 IQ 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


not as sensible and serious citizens. And this 
danger — great in itself — would have been the 
greater, if He had deigned to reveal the nature of 
the punitive processes by which the sin-stained soul 
is redeemed. 

Thus it is, or seems to be, that such Revelation as 
our Lord affords of the unseen world refers almost 
wholly to the world of light. He speaks of Heaven ; 
the darkness of Hell He leaves to be inferred by the 
law of contrast. It is in accordance with His Mind, 
then, to inquire more nearly what Heaven will be; it 
is not so to speculate upon Hell. But even here 
His singular reticence does not fail. It is the more 
remarkable, because in the Gospels He claims to 
possess a perfect knowledge of the heavenly state. 
If He does not tell what Heaven is, it is not that 
He does not know, it is that He does not will to 
tell. 

Jesus Christ, as has been said, assumed the fact of 
Immortality. He impressed it upon human hearts 
by the doctrine of “ the Eternal Life ” which He 
exemplified. And He declared that of “the Eternal 
Life/’ when set free from material limitations, He 
knew, and He alone, the absolute truth. 

Jesus Christ was as intimately acquainted with 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


3il 

Heaven as any one may be with the scene of his 
earthly home. In all that He says of it His words are 
stamped with complete information and authority. 
His words are such as these : “ In My Father’s house 
are many mansions ; if it were not so, I would have 
told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” 1 “They 
neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as 
the angels of God in heaven.” 2 “ Take heed that ye 

despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto 
you that in heaven their angels do always behold the 
face of My Father which is in heaven.” 3 “I say 
unto you, There is joy in the presence of the angels 
of God over one sinner that repenteth.” 4 “To-day 
shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” 5 “No man 
hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, 
which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath 
declared Him.” 6 

These and other such passages, however some of 
them may be interpreted, are clear and definite in 
their assertion of a complete knowledge respecting 
Heaven and the heavenly state. 

No doubt the language of our Lord is figurative 
or allegorical, and it must be interpreted with due 

1 St. John xiv. 2. 2 St. Matthew xxii. 30. 3 St. Matthew xviii. 10. 

4 St. Luke xv. 10. 6 St. Luke xxiii. 43. 6 St. John i. 18. 


3 12 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


regard to its character. For the heavenly life is in 
its nature purely spiritual. It is the life of the spirit 
— of the soul — not of the body. It is free from 
material conditions; for spirit is not matter, but the 
opposite of matter, and therefore whatever con¬ 
ditions are necessary or natural to matter are or may 
be assumed to be alien from spirit. 

Human thought is impotent to apprehend 
spiritual existence. So far as existence falls within 
human observation, it is always material. It is 
subject to material limitations. We do not speak of 
spiritual or intellectual life except under metaphor. 
Such words as “comprehension” or “apprehen¬ 
sion ” are themselves metaphorical; so too are all 
words relating to the mind or the soul. The in¬ 
herent difficulty of metaphysics is that metaphysical 
language is physical language used in an artificial 
significance. 

How, then, is it possible to impress upon human 
minds, confined as they are within materialistic 
limits, a conception of a life that is immaterial, 
spiritual, eternal ? There is no other way than the 
use of material language; but to accept such 
language literally is to misunderstand it. Our Lord, 
in portraying the life of Heaven, used, and could not 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


3*3 


avoid using, a terminology derived from the life of 
earth . 1 

Thus He spoke of Heaven in the language of 
place. He called it “paradise.” When He would 
describe the future blessedness of emancipated souls, 
He said it was to “lie in Abraham’s bosom,” em¬ 
ploying a Rabbinical phrase which His hearers 
could hardly mistake. The “ many mansions ” of 
Heaven are not actual edifices; no reasonable 
person would think of so understanding them; 
they indicate the character of Heaven, not its 
structure. 

In the Apocalypse, again, “the holy city, New 
Jerusalem,” which St. John saw “coming down 
from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride 
adorned for her husband,” is described, in respect 
of its walls and its foundations and its gates, nay, 
of its dimensions, with a precise and elaborate 
accuracy which simply forbids the idea of literal 
interpretation. 

Such language, intelligently and reverently con¬ 
sidered, deserves to be placed beside the parables 

1 In the part of the essay beginning here I have employed and 
in some degree extended the argument of a contribution which I 
made some little time ago to a book entitled The Faith of Centuries. 


3i4 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


of our Lord Himself. For they too are vivid 
representations of spiritual laws under the aspect 
of natural phenomena; and while no attempt at 
literal precision would or could have wrought a 
hundredth part of the effect that the parables have 
wrought upon the conscience of the world, it would 
be an error to forget that they are broad spiritual 
pictures, not to be treated scientifically or to be 
pressed in every detail, but Divine suggestions and 
adumbrations of truths that lie, and must for ever lie, 
beyond the reach of Man’s unsanctified intelligence. 

Similarly our Lord spoke of Heaven in the lan¬ 
guage of time. Immortality, Eternity, are not indeed 
strictly temporal expressions. They are the nega¬ 
tion of time, not its prolongation ; but as existence 
apart from time does not fall under human experience, 
it is commonly, although unphilosophically, regarded 
as illimitable time, which is itself a self-contradiction, 
an unthinkable thought. 

It is not to be denied that our Lord spoke ot the 
future life, or of the life which reaches into futurity 
although it is a present life, as “ aeonian ” or 
eternal, or that His apostles spoke of it as lasting 
u for ever and ever,” i.e., more strictly, “ for ages of 
ages.” Nor is this language to be explained or 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


315 

whittled away; the life is “aeonian” and the 
punishment endured within it “aeonian”; but it is 
the language of earth applied to the life of Heaven or 
of Hell; it is material language but not spiritual, and 
it must not be understood as though it were possible 
to convey under the forms of material existence 
a precise idea of such a life as is absolutely and 
intrinsically free from all association with matter. 

Heaven — and Hell too, as its shadow—is not a 
place or a time, but a state. It is not subject to any 
conditions, local or temporal. It is not here or 
now, but simply is; and the truest thought of it is 
to think of it in itself without any such question as 
where it is or when or for how long. 

Our Lord always described “the Eternal Life” in 
relation to God. Man in his probation upon earth 
possesses a certain spiritual affinity to his Maker. 
The affinity is circumscribed by material conditions. 

But Man in his felicity, however it may be attained, 
will enjoy a perfect intimacy with God. Then will 
his human nature be fully assimilated to the Divine. 
And in virtue of this assimilation, progressive or 
final, Man’s life — his “Eternal Life”—will put off 
the conditions of the flesh, i.e., of time and place 
and of matter generally, and will become wholly 


316 the hope of immortality 

spiritual; it will be, in our Lord’s own language, as 
the life of the angels. 

To spiritualise the conception of the Divine 
Nature and so of human, nature as the image of the 
Divine was the lesson of our Lord in His Reve¬ 
lation. But it is when we realise, as far as Man 
may, what the spirit is and the spiritual life and all 
that belongs to it, that we understand how solemn 
the duty of caution is in speculating and deciding 
upon the invisible world. 

This one fact, however, is certain, that, as death is 
the separation of body and soul, or in other words, 
of the material and spiritual elements in human 
nature, whatever impediment the body or the flesh 
sets to the activity of the soul or to its passivity 
must be assumed to be done away at death. 

For instance, it is the Divine law that sin should 
entail suffering. That law, like other similar laws, 
is not completely but only partially vindicated in the 
present life. To realise it as absolute and universal 
is an act of faith. We see in part, we know in part. 
There are sinful actions which are seen to be attended 
by immediate or ultimate punishment in the present 
life. The drunkard or the debauchee bears often, if 
not invariably, upon his person the visible marks of 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


317 

the Divine anger against sin. It is not so with all 
sinful actions. There are actions which, however 
antagonistic they may be to God’s Will, are not 
evidently followed by temporal punishment. Still 
more there are virtuous actions which seem to issue 
in loss and suffering. All this has been felt, and in 
this essay has been urged, as an argument for the 
belief in Immortality. But when it is asked, What 
is it that interposes between virtue and its satisfac¬ 
tion, between sin and its penalty ? the answer, if 
briefly put, is — the flesh. It is because the soul of 
Man in his earthly life is not free and open to the 
laws of Providence, but is, as it were, enveloped, 
hardened and concealed by matter, i.e., by the flesh, 
that he does not feel, or feels only imperfectly, the 
Divinely appointed sequence of cause and effect in 
good and evil. But let the material veil be rent 
asunder, as it will be at death, and let the soul of 
Man stand face to face with his Maker; then will 
the Divine blessing and the Divine indignation be 
realised in their fulness and, as the guilty will at 
once experience an anguish of which they were 
unconscious and incapable upon earth, so will the 
righteous, when they “awake after God’s like¬ 
ness,” be enriched with the fruition of a feli- 


3 i8 the hope of immortality 

city such as the world can neither give nor take 
away. 

In the light of this thought the intimations of 
Jesus Christ respecting Immortality become infinitely 
significant. They may be drawn from His own 
words and from the words of His inspired Apostles. 

The soul, it has been said, which survives the 
hour of death is equivalent to the total sum of the 
intellectual, moral and spiritual powers of human 
nature. All these powers, then, are carried into 
Eternity. All are emancipated from the limiting and 
obscuring influence of matter. And all are by this 
emancipation quickened, energised and intensified. 

Thus the intellect of Man, in its relation to Divine 
Providence, is confronted by serious difficulties. As 
it looks out upon the face of Nature, it stands 
bewildered. The world is not what it might natur¬ 
ally be expected to be upon the supposition of an 
Omnipotent and Benevolent Creator. It is in St. 
Paul’s phrase “ made subject to vanity.” It lies under 
gloom, contradiction and apparent failure. The 
intellect of Man is for ever asking why things are 
ordered as they are and not otherwise, what is their 
law or purport or end. Among the facts of human 
thought none is more striking — none more significant 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


3 I 9 


— than the tenacity with which Man, when once he 
has attained to the belief in God, has clung to it 
amidst a thousand difficulties and disappointments. 

The Christian theological view is that the intellect 
of Man is not, nor can be, a competent critic of 
Divine Providence. It is limited in the same way 
as his eyesight; and it can be aided by faith as his 
eyesight by the microscope or the telescope. But so 
long as Man remains in the flesh, so long must it be 
impossible for him to understand the ways of God. 
There is always a veil spread, as it were, between 
him and his Maker; he sees “ through a glass, 
darkly,” he knows only “in part,” it is behind the 
veil that he shall see “face to face,” and shall “know 
even as he is known.” 

P'or if the flesh, with its varied appetites and 
affections, is upon the whole the curtain which dims 
the light of Heaven, it is a natural inference that, 
when the curtain is done away by the emancipation 
of the spirit from the flesh, the light will shine in its 
full radiancy upon the soul. Then will doubts and 
difficulties cease. Then will faith be unimpeded 
and unclouded. Then will the soul contemplate 
the celestial verities as they are in themselves. 

The student of the Apocalypse will recall the 


3 2 ° 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


splendid scene in which it is related how “the book 
written within and on the back side, sealed with seven 
seals,” is opened. “ And no man in heaven, nor on 
earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the 
book, neither to look thereon. And I wept much,” 
says the Divine seer, “because no man was found 
worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look 
thereon. And one of the elders said unto me, Weep 
not, behold the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root 
of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to 
loose the seven seals thereof.” 1 What is the purport 
of the scene, if it be not that in the eternal world the 
ever-present, ever-haunting mystery of Creation will 
at length be revealed ? The redeemed souls will 
enjoy the beatific vision. They will meditate, with 
ineffable wonder and awe, upon the Providential 
plan extending from eternity to eternity. They will 
discern in the Incarnation of the Son of God the 
solution of all that was dark and hopeless in men’s 
eyes before that event, and even since has been 
known and reverenced only “in part.” And as they 
realise the infinite majesty and mercy of the Divine 
Plan, encompassing, as it shall, the whole Creation, 
animate and inanimate, they shall burst into the 

1 Revelation v. 3-5. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


3 2 


exultant anthem which the seer heard to issue from 
“ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of 
thousands.” “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain 
to receive power, and riches and wisdom, and 
strength and honour and glory and blessing. . . . 
Blessing and honour and glory and power be unto 
Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the 
Lamb for ever and ever.” 1 

But the thought of the unseen world suggests a 
moral as well as an intellectual illumination. And 
this too depends upon the emancipation of the soul 
from the trammels of the flesh. For the flesh, as 
St. Paul regards it, is the centre of the anti-spiritual 
affections and passions in human nature. For “the 
flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against 
the flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other. 
So that ye cannot do the things that ye would.” 2 
And again, “To be carnally minded (i.e., the mind 
of the flesh, to (j)povr]p,a tt)? aapicos) is death ; but to 
be spiritually minded (i.e., the mind of the spirit, 
to (ppovr/pia rod irvevpLaro^) is life and peace.” 3 

In fact, the New Testament consistently represents 
two main forces as antagonistic to the moral or 

1 Revelation v. 12, 13. 2 Galatians v. 17. 

8 Romans viii. 6. 


Y 


3 22 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


spiritual life which Christ enjoined; and both are 
intimately associated with matter. 

One is the world — the /coo-yno?, properly the ordered 
visible Universe, the opposite of Chaos, but taken 
by our Lord and His Apostles after Him to signify 
the total sum of the secular or material interests, 
influences, occupations and associations which tend 
to come between the soul of Man and God. This it 
is which our Lord treated as His main enemy ; it 
was this which nailed Him to the Cross. To save 
men from the world was the object of His life and 
of His death. Thus He said, “ If the world (o /eoo-yLto?) 
hate you, ye know that it hated Me before it hated 
you. If ye were of the world, the world would love 
his own; but because ye are not of the world, but I 
have chosen you out of the world, therefore the 
world hateth you.” 1 And soon afterwards, “ In the 
world (iv tw /cocrfjLa)) ye shall have tribulation ; but be 
of good cheer, I have overcome the world .” 2 So 
too, St. John in a remarkable passage which reflects 
the specially Christian tone of thought respecting 
the material world, uses these words, “ Love not the 
world ( tov fcoo-fjiov), neither the things that are in the 
world. If any man love the world, the love of the 

1 St. John XV. 19. 2 Jbid. xvi. 33. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


3 2 3 


Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, 
the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes and the 
pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. 
And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof; 
but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.” 1 

The world, then, or /eoV^o?, is the material Universe. 
Sometimes, as in the passage of St. John’s Epistle, it 
includes the lower or sensual side of human nature, 
“the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes,” but it 
is not so used generally. “The world,” strictly 
considered, stands for all that in external Nature tells 
against sanctity or against spirituality, for all that is 
contrary to the Will of God. But all this is essentially 
material; its sphere is the visible or tangible or 
substantial; it is different and distant from what is 
spiritual. 

The other anti-spiritual force is the flesh (97 cra^f). 
And as “ the world ” is used for all such material 
objects as, lying outside the nature of Man, do yet 
in their measure and degree draw him away from 
God, so is “the flesh” used for the material and 
secular tendencies of his nature itself. Christian 
souls know only too well what this power of “the 
flesh ” is. For, as they feel after God and aspire to 


1 1 St . John ii . 15 - 17 . 


3 2 4 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


Him, they are sorrowfully conscious of something 
within them that impedes and degrades their higher 
being, something that drags them back as with 
chains irresistible, and thwarts the nobility and 
sanctity that is in them, and compels or inclines 
them to do what they hate and contemn themselves 
for doing. How true to life is St. Paul’s confession 
— as true as it is graphic ! “ I delight in the law of 

God after the inward man. But I see another law in 
my members, warring against the law of my mind, 
and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin 
which is in my members. O wretched man that I 
am ! Who shall deliver me from the body of this 
death ?” 1 

But it is important to observe that this influence 
of evil is by St. Paul conceived as essentially 
material. His words, “the law of sin which is in 
my members,” “the body of this death,” as else¬ 
where, “the mind of the flesh,” point to matter 
as the seat and centre of evil. And is it not a 
simple fact of human experience that besides the 
devil and the world there is in Man an influence 
drawing him away from God — an influence of 
which he is conscious in all the difficulties and 


1 Romans vii. 22 - 24 . 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


325 

embarrassments of his moral life —and that the 
seat of this influence is the sense or the body, the 
material part of his composite being ; in one word, 
the “flesh”? But if this be so, it follows that the 
emancipation of the soul from the body at death 
will be, at least in the instance of : the blessed souls, 
a deliverance from the lowering, humiliating ten¬ 
dency of matter, whether in the world or in the flesh. 
The soul will no more experience a constant 
antinomy. It will no more approve one thing and 
do another, no more act as it would fain not have 
acted, no more see the vision of beauty and forget 
or neglect it. Moral duty will become clear and 
commanding. It will speak in imperious and 
irresistible tones. It will be freed from the pains 
and difficulties which now attend it; for as it is 
the association of the soul with the body that in 
the present life renders the performance of duty 
difficult and painful, so when the soul is set free 
from the body it will realise at last the perfect and 
cloudless felicity of doing the Will of God as a 
simple pleasure continually without any hindrance 
at all or failure or distress. 

Such, then, in its moral aspect is “the Eternal 
Life ” as our Lord taught it, the pure spiritual life, 


326 THE hope of immortality 

the life of Heaven. Such too was the lesson of 
His own Life, as when He said, “ Wist ye not that I 
must be about my Father’s business?” 1 or “My 
meat is to do the Will of Him that sent Me and to 
finish His work,” 2 or again, “ I do always those 
things that please Him.” 3 For indeed He lived 
on earth the heavenly life; and to do the Will of God 
perfectly and to be perfectly happy in doing it is 
Heaven. This is the life for which Man, as redeemed 
by Christ, is permitted to look. It will be to him 
a restoration, a regeneration. His moral nature, 
clouded as it has been upon earth, shall become 
purified. As the saints upon earth — the souls who 
stand nearest to God — have many a time found 
happiness and peace unspeakable, amidst most bitter 
sufferings of the flesh, in doing God’s Will, so shall 
the redeemed and sanctified souls in Heaven ex¬ 
perience what it is to toil without effort or reluc¬ 
tance, and to serve without weariness, and to fulfil 
the moral law of their being in complete felicity, 
knowing God even as they are known of Him. 

But the life of Heaven, if it is intellectual, if it 
is moral, is also spiritual or devotional — nay, it is 
this above all else. And that it must be so is evident 

1 St. Luke ii. 49. 2 St. John iv. 34. 3 St. John viii. 29. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


3 2 7 


in the nature of things. For what is the true 
attitude of Man toward his Maker ? It is not 
reflexion, still less is it criticism ; it is worship. 

The proper dignity of Man lies in worship. 
Humility is his honour. Prostration before the 
throne of the Supreme is his exaltation. It is not 
when he gives himself airs as though he were lord 
of the visible Universe, but when he cries, standing 
afar off, “God be merciful to me a sinner,” that 
he rises to the true height of his nature. Higher 
than the hero, higher than the philosopher, is, in the 
standard of Divine realities, the saint. 

Yet to Man upon earth it is almost infinitely 
difficult to enter upon his right relation to his 
Maker. He does not know God. He does not 
know even himself. His opinion of his own place 
in Nature is, as has been said, at one time too high, 
at another too low. Were it not for special ex¬ 
periences such as suffering, bereavement and death, 
or again such as moments of ecstacy and inspiration, 
he would not feel that he was or could be a son of 
God. 

And even when he realises the duty and blessing 
of worshipping God, how much is there that comes 
between him and the heavenly vision! 


328 the hope of immortality 

There is no such humbling fact of human nature 
as that Man cannot even worship as he would. 
His supplications, his adorations, are always im¬ 
perfect. His very prayers need to be prayed over 
again. His penitences need themselves to be re¬ 
pented of. It is this fact which makes the spiritual 
life even of the best men a spectacle so pathetic, 
so tragical. 

And yet man feels within himself a longing after 
God, a power of communion with God. Nothing 
can wholly destroy or disguise it. It is an element 
of his humanity. It is a witness to his capacity 
for “the Eternal Life.” “The spirit itself beareth 
witness with our spirit, that we are the children 
of God.” 1 

But when it is asked what are the causes that 
make Man, in his earthly life, only half-conscious 
of his affinity to God, or only half-capable of 
Divine worship, the answer must inevitably be that 
they lie in the material or carnal appetites and 
tendencies of his nature, i.e., in the flesh. Thus 
it is that in his best moments he longs above all else 
to be freed from the flesh. He desires to become 
a pure spiritual being, as are the angels who do 


1 Romans viii. 16. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


3 2 9 


God’s Will perfectly. It would seem, then, that the 
condition of spirituality is the emancipation of the 
soul from the body. For “flesh and blood cannot 
inherit the kingdom of God,” 1 as St. Paul says. 
But this is just the change which death effects ; 
and such a change, unless it be vitiated by a 
personal taint, e.g. y by sin, as it places Man in direct 
relation to his Maker, will necessarily elicit his 
full energy of admiring and adoring veneration. 
When we see God as He is, we shall worship Him 
as we ought. 

While it would be a speculative error then, and 
in some sense a detraction from the full Christian 
doctrine of Immortality, to imagine that “the 
Eternal Life” beyond the grave will be wholly 
devotional, and while it is a part of the Christian 
Revelation to believe that that life will afford scope 
for the intellectual and moral excellences of which 
human nature is capable, as well as for the 
devotional, yet the whole tenor of Christ’s teach¬ 
ing implies that worship will be the soul’s most 
potent and persistent exercise in futurity. We shall 
know then, not partially, as now, but fully. We 
shall understand the deep mysteries of Providence. 

1 i Corinthians xv. 50. 


330 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


But the knowledge, the revelation, will issue in 
an unspeakable rapture of worship. Thus in the 
imagery of the Apocalypse it is ever worship which 
fills the picture of the unseen world. “ The four 
and twenty elders fall down before Him that sat 
on the throne, and worship Him that liveth for 
ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the 
throne, saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive 
glory and honour and power; for Thou hast created 
all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were 
created.” 1 

To sum up what has been said : The conditions of 
the perfected or Eternal Life in Immortality seem 
to be these: 

1. An intuitive understanding of the Providential 

purpose of God as revealed in the Creation, 
Salvation and Regeneration of the world, but 
especially and pre-eminently of Mankind. 

2. A loyal and happy obedience to the Will of God 

in ministration, self-sacrifice and purity. 

3. A continuous ecstacy of devotion before the 

throne of God and of Christ. 

These are the conditions of the heavenly life, and 

1 Revelation iv. io, n. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


33 1 


the shadow or reverse of these, with its keen, 
incessant sense of misery, is Hell. 

But it still remains to inquire: If such is the 
Life Immortal, what is the relation of souls on 
earth to those that have passed, for happiness or woe, 
behind the veil ? Can we do aught for them or 
they for us ? Is intelligence possible between them 
and us, or sympathy or affection ? The instinctive 
sentiment of Humanity suggests that, if the dead 
live after death and live a higher or more spiritual 
life, though it is in a sense a continuation of the 
present, death cannot be an absolute bar to the 
interests and associations which were so rich and 
so precious in the present life. The Christian Creed 
responds to this strong human sentiment by its 
doctrine of the Communion of Saints. It teaches 
that the holy ones on earth and in Heaven are knit 
together as members of one family by spiritual 
ties. Bishop Pearson, in his Exposition of the 
Creed, writes as follows : 

“ The communion of saints in the Church 
of Christ with those which are departed is 
demonstrated by their communion with the saints 
alive. For if I have a communion with a saint 
of God, as such, while he liveth here, I must 


33 2 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


still have communion with him when he is 
departed hence; because the foundation of that 
communion cannot be removed by death. The 
mystical union between Christ and His Church, the 
spiritual conjunction of the members to the Head, 
is the true foundation of that communion which one 
member hath with another, all the members living 
and increasing by the same influence which they 
receive from Him. But death, which is nothing 
else but the separation of the soul from the body, 
maketh no separation in the mystical union, no 
breach of the spiritual conjunction, and consequently 
there must continue the same communion, because 
there remaineth the same foundation.” 1 

The Bishop, as is known, is singularly cautious 
in drawing any practical inferences from the 
doctrine which he expounds. Yet it would seem 
that the doctrine implies, if it does not actually 
enforce, certain lessons. 

For if a sympathy exists between the living and 
the dead, as may be inferred not only from our 
Lord’s explicit teaching but from the Christian 
conception of death itself as an entrance upon 
Immortality, there can be no other channel or 


1 Article ix. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


333 


instrument of such sympathy than prayer. For it 
is the peculiar quality of prayer that it transcends, 
as nothing else can, the limitations of place and 
time and of matter in general, and that, wherever 
and by whomever and for whomever it is offered, 
its efficacy is the same. Prayer, then, may be justly 
regarded as the medium of spiritual sympathy 
between the living and the dead. But the essence 
of prayer is mutual helpfulness. We pray for 
others, as they for us. We seek to strengthen 
them and to comfort them by our prayers. And 
whatever blessing we hope to receive as an answer 
to prayer, we are eager to give. 

Christian souls, impressed with the mystery of 
the Universe, will be the last to doubt the help¬ 
fulness of prayer. 

“ More things (says the poet) are wrought by prayer 
Than this world dreams of.” 1 

And when all the mystery underlying phe¬ 
nomena, in the latest age of human thought 
as in the earliest, is deeply felt, it will be owned 
that opportunity remains and must remain for 
prayer. Intercessory prayer is the privilege of 
Humanity. God has not revealed its full virtue 

1 Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur. 


334 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


or efficacy. But is it not a probable thought that 
the mysterious longings after holiness, the intense 
desires for a purity not of earth, which come we 
know not whence and arise we know not how 
in human hearts, the high immortal aspirations, 
are, as it were, echoes of the prayers that those 
who love us, as well the dead as the living, breathe 
for ourselves ? They descend like the showers of 
Heaven, and like the showers they return not in vain. 

But we too may and must pray for the dead, 
as they for us. Without such prayer the Com¬ 
munion of Saints becomes but a dream. We 
know not how or in what degree prayer is operative, 
although we know that so it is, upon earth, 
and we cannot know how it may affect them who 
have passed within the veil. But to pray for them 
is an act of faith and reverence. No act sustains 
so well as this the sympathy of saints. None is 
so potent to create and energise the assurance 
that the dead are still the living. None is such 
a witness to the reality of a purely spiritual exist¬ 
ence and communion. None is so deep and true 
a solace in the presence of the realities which ever 
and again darken and sadden human life. 

The duty or privilege of prayer for the dead does 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


335 


not so much rest upon isolated passages of Holy 
Scripture; it rests upon the whole conception of 
Immortality as expressed in the Revelation of 
Jesus Christ. To believe in intercessory prayer 
for the dead is not to believe that the state of the 
dead is mapped out in purgatorial or other periods 
which a living human authority can modify at will. 
It is indeed the very opposite of that belief. For 
a belief so formal or mechanical touching the dead 
is opposed to the fine and sensitive outlines of the 
Gospel. Our Lord did not teach, nor empower 
any one to teach, what the future life precisely 
is, or how it may be affected or influenced by acts 
done upon earth. He taught only the doctrine 
of the Communion of Saints; and from that 
doctrine flows the spiritual sympathy, of which 
intercessory prayer is the expression, between the 
living and the dead. And he who has appre¬ 
hended the eternal verity of the spiritual life will 
no more doubt that prayer can pass the barriers 
of the unseen world than he will doubt that the 
spirit itself passes those barriers when it is 
emancipated from the body at death. For Jesus 
Christ in His exaltation holds the keys not of Hell 
only ( i.e ., of Hades), but of death. 


336 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


And yet another inference seems to follow as 
certain. If the future life is a continuation of 
the present, and if prayer is the spiritual link 
between the visible and invisible worlds, then the 
helpfulness of intercessory prayer depends at once 
upon the possibility — I do not say the certainty — 
of the soul’s progress or development in the 
future. 

There is no word in Holy Scripture to suggest 
that the fate of souls, whether the good or the 
wicked, will be uniform after death. It is an assump¬ 
tion of a wilful Theology that all who are happy 
in the future Life will be equally happy, and all 
who suffer will suffer alike. The Scriptural intima¬ 
tions are wholly contrary. Our Lord speaks of 
some who have done wrong as being punished 
with many and others with few stripes. Similarly 
He promises that less or greater fidelity in the 
present life shall be rewarded with less or greater 
opportunity of service in the future, as in the 
parable of the talents, where the servant whose 
pound had gained ten pounds is appointed to “have 
authority over ten cities,” and he whose pound 
had gained five pounds is appointed to “be over 
five cities.” 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


337 


But if a variety of destinies in the unseen world, 
whether of happiness or of suffering, is reserved 
for mankind, and yet more if the principle of that 
world is not inactivity but energy or character or 
life, it is reasonable to believe that the souls which 
enter upon the future state with the taint of sin 
clinging to them, in whatever form or degree, will 
be slowly cleansed by a disciplinary or purificatory 
process from whatever it is that, being evil in itself, 
necessarily obstructs or obscures the Vision of God. 
The parable of Dives and Lazarus seems clearly to 
indicate a certain moral progress as the effect of 
retributory discipline. But it is natural and neces¬ 
sary to believe in such a progress, as a part of 
Christ’s Revelation, if it be true, as this essay has 
tended to show, that the future life is a continua¬ 
tion of the present, only that it is a purely spiritual 
life, and as such is emancipated from the limita¬ 
tions which render the suffering that comes of 
sin, as also the happiness that comes of virtue, less 
vivid and evident than in the nature of things they 
properly are. And this is the benediction of human 
nature, to feel that, as souls upon earth are fortified 
and elevated by the prayers offered for them in the 
unseen world, so too by our prayers may the souls 
z 


338 THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 

which have passed behind the veil be lifted higher 
and higher into the knowledge and contemplation 
and fruition of God. 

The conception of the future life, as spiritually 
continuing and completing the present, sheds a 
light upon the problem, which it is impossible to 
ignore, of mutual recognition in eternity. In the 
human hours of bereavement and desolation, when 
it is as though the sun had been blotted out from 
the heaven, we ask ourselves by the grave of our 
beloved ones, Shall we meet again ? Shall we know 
one another in Heaven ? To this deep anxiety of 
the heart Shakespeare gives expression in the lines 
where Constance cries — 

“ Father cardinal, I have heard you say 
That we shall see and know our friends in heaven: 

If that be true, I shall see my boy again ; 

For since the birth of Cain, the first male child 
To him that did but yesterday suspire, 

There was not .such a gracious creature born. 

But now will canker sorrow eat my bud, 

And chase the native beauty from his cheek, 

And he will look as hollow as a ghost; 

As dim and meagre as an ague’s fit; 

And so he’ll die ; and, rising so again, 

When I shall meet him in the court of heaven, 

I shall not know him: therefore never, never 
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.” 1 


1 King John, Act iii., scene iv. 



AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


339 


Nor is any satisfaction of this anxiety possible, 
unless it be found in the Revelation of Jesus Christ. 
But if the spiritual life of Man be, as He taught, 
eternal, and if it be a life beginning on earth but 
transcending the earthly bounds of place or time, 
then the identity of the life before and after death 
would seem to imply that they who knew and loved 
each other upon earth will not forfeit the exquisite 
happiness of such mutual knowledge and love in the 
world to come. For that which passes into Immor¬ 
tality is the whole man, except only his body. It 
is the person himself, his consciousness, his intellect, 
his moral, emotional and spiritual being. For per¬ 
sonality survives death. It is the soul, which begins 
a new or larger life, but does not begin life, behind 
the veil. The earthly human material relations of 
the present life disappear when the body moulders 
in the grave, as our Lord Himself teaches when He 
says that there is no such thing as marrying or giving 
in marriage in eternity; but the spiritual affections 
and affinities endure eternally. And, where no loss 
of personality takes place, the power of mutual 
recognition must remain. 

The poet of the In Memoriam , in his musings 
upon the Eternal Life in which he exhibited so 
strong a faith, puts this truth clearly — 


340 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


11 Eternal form shall still divide 
The eternal soul from all beside ; 

And I shall know him when we meet.” 

Such is the Christian thought of the dead as 
living still, and living a life more subtle and spiritual 
than upon earth ; and of all thoughts it is perhaps 
the most hallowing, the most ennobling, in its in¬ 
fluence upon mankind. For he who believes in the 
life of the dead must himself live not unworthily of 
the dead. 

“ How pure at heart and sound in head, 

With what Divine affections bold 
Should be the man whose thought would hold 
An hour’s communion with the dead.” 

Le culte des morts — that beautiful habit and act of 
the Catholic Faith—needs revival in Protestant The¬ 
ology. Protestantism, which so well exhibits the 
strength, and so ill the poetry or romance of religion, 
and is always in danger of losing the delicate flower 
of devotion, has too much forgotten the dead. It has 
buried them out of mind as out of sight. It has not 
thought of them as dwelling in communion with the 
progress, the sympathies, the aspirations, of the holy 
and eternal souls upon earth. It will not be altogether 
in vain that this essay has been written, if it shall 
help to inspire any living human soul with a more 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


341 


tender and constant memory of the dead. The 
Festival of All Souls is a commemoration which 
enriches and ennobles Humanity. 

Thus to one who lives on earth the Eternal Life 
which is Christ’s revelation and benediction to the 
world, death, it would seem, makes some such differ¬ 
ence as this : It is a rending of the veil of the flesh. 
It is a passing, as it were, within the sanctuary. It 
is a quickening of the intellectual and moral sensi¬ 
bility. The faculties and energies of the soul are 
intensified, as the material barriers which the body 
sets to them are done away. Thus faith merges in 
knowledge. Hope attains to realisation. Life be¬ 
comes a pure spiritual activity. Whatever is gross 
or material or sensual in human nature ceases. 
Whatever is pure and sacred is purified and sancti¬ 
fied. The soul, unclouded and unimpeded, stands 
before God. This is the celestial state, the beatific 
vision. It is for this that the saints have prayed so 
long and striven. Of its felicity they have enjoyed 
glimpses few and far, as when St. Paul was “ caught 
up to the third heaven” and “heard unspeakable 
words which it is not lawful for a man to utter .” 1 

But such rapture is only the faint anticipation of 
1 2 Corinthians xii. 24. 


342 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


the beatitude which the souls, redeemed by Christ, 
enjoy for ever and ever. 

Of Hell, as it is called, and of the disciplinary 
process to which unhallowed souls are subjected 
when this life is ended, it is impossible to form a 
conception save through the contrast in which it 
stands to the beatific state; for it has not been the 
Will of God to reveal more than its mere shadowy 
outline. But if the flesh or material part of 
human nature is indeed, as has been argued in this 
essay, a force that mitigates and obscures the natural 
necessary effect of the Divine indignation against 
sin, it must be inferred that, when the soul stands at 
the Judgment-bar, the misery of sin, the pain of loss, 
the burning sense of all that might have been and 
yet is not and may never be, above all the ever 
present consciousness of alienation from Him to 
Whom Man’s spiritual being tends unceasingly, will 
be an agony so sharp and subtle as to extort an 
exceeding bitter cry for the pardon and peace of 
Heaven. Beyond this point Revelation does not 
pass; and it were idle, if not even impious, to dream 
of passing. God has taught in His Gospel as much 
as Man needs to know for his conduct in life; it has 
not been the Divine Will to teach more. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


343 


But the Christian Revelation adds to the creed of 
Immortality one special doctrine which may not be 
omitted, though it may be felt to lie beyond the just 
scope of this essay. It is the doctrine of the cor¬ 
poreal Resurrection. It demands consideration, 
because at first sight it seems to make against 
the pure and perfect spirituality of the Life 
Immortal. 

And, indeed, it is a doctrine which must be 
accepted, if at all, upon the authority of a Divine 
Revelation. It is not recommended by such 
general arguments as have been adduced in behalf 
of Immortality. The analogies of which Nature 
is full, though persuasively used by a thinker so 
profound as St. Paul, must be admitted, as has been 
urged in the fourth chapter of this essay, to possess 
but slight evidential validity as witnesses to the 
corporeal resurrection of the dead. 

It is not in this way that the Resurrection has 
been taught to the world. It is a belief distinctively 
Christian. The Apostles of Christianity believed 
and insisted upon belief in the Resurrection, 
because they believed that Jesus Christ had risen 
from the grave. 

Of the evidence for the Resurrection this is not 


344 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


the place to speak. All that need be said is that His 
Resurrection must not be treated as if it were the 
final act of a Life which was in all respects, except 
this act, assimilated to the common conditions of 
Humanity. The Resurrection was not an extra¬ 
ordinary event in an ordinary life; it was the 
extraordinary consummation of a Life which, from 
its beginning to its end, was all extraordinary. 
That Jesus Christ should rise from the grave was 
undoubtedly a superhuman event. But His claims 
to be sinless, to forgive the sins of others, to be the 
Judge of the quick and the dead, were equally super¬ 
human. It is the whole Life — the whole Personal¬ 
ity— of Jesus Christ, not His Resurrection alone, 
which stands upon a higher than human level of 
Being. His whole Life, His whole Personality, is 
superhuman ; but it is uniform. 

To Christian hearts the Resurrection of Jesus 
Christ is an absolute assurance that the dead shall 
rise. “ If the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised : 
and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are 
yet in your sins.” 1 For by His Resurrection — the 
most completely attested event in the origin of 
Christianity— He proved for all time that, where the 

1 I Corinthians xv. 16, 17. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


345 

Spirit is supreme in human nature, death, as an 
ultimate fact, is impossible; and in proportion as 
men are inheritors of His Nature, His Immortality 
is theirs ; and the Resurrection of His body is an 
evidence, as it is an illustration, of the destiny await¬ 
ing theirs beyond the grave. His Resurrection, then, 
is a proof of Immortality; for it could not be true 
if Immortality were not a truth. 

But while the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, 
involving, as it seems, the Resurrection of Mankind, 
is always treated in the Acts of the Apostles and in 
the Epistles as the very heart of the Christian Reve¬ 
lation, it would not be consistent with the purpose 
of this essay to go beyond the question, What will 
be the nature of the body as it rises into life? The 
New Testament supplies an answer to that question 
so far as it affects the bodies of the holy dead, but 
not otherwise. For in the New Testament two dis¬ 
tinct Resurrections are contemplated — the general 
resurrection of all men, called in the Greek rj ava- 
cttchtis rwv ve/cpwv, and the special resurrection of 
Christians, called r/ e^avdo-racn^ rj i/c twv ve/cpwv, 
though it is true that some variety of terms occurs. 
It is to the specially Christian Resurrection that I 
now refer. 


346 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


There are, then, in Christian Theology, two 
bodies, or phases of the same body, belonging to 
every man. 

One is “the body of humiliation,” i.e., the body 
which he possesses upon earth, a weak, fragile, 
material, perishing, sinful body. 

The other is “the body of glory,” i.e., the same 
body but no longer material or moribund, a body 
conformable to the body which our Lord Himself 
possesses in His glory . 1 

And the change which will pass upon the human 
body at the Resurrection is that it will emerge, as 
the butterfly from the chrysalis, out of its present 
material environment into a purified and glorified 
existence. 

Bishop Pearson hardly rises to an adequate 
realisation of the celestial body in its dignity and 
spirituality when he writes, “ We can, therefore, no 
otherwise expound this article, touching ‘ the resur¬ 
rection of the body,’ than by asserting that the 
bodies which have lived and died shall live again 
after death, and that the same flesh which is 
corrupted shall be restored ; whatsoever alteration 
shall be made shall not be of their nature, but of 

1 See Philippians iii. 21. 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


347 

their conditions ; not of their substance, but of their 
qualities.” 1 

The body at its Resurrection will be the same 
body, but it will be glorified. It will be emanci¬ 
pated from the limiting and tainting conditions of 
matter. It will be a spiritual and sacred body. It 
will be such a body as is necessary to personality, 
but not such as is necessary to material life. 

What the body will then be it is not given to Man 
to realise, unless appproximately and figuratively. 
But there is one incident of the Gospel which 
illustrates its nature. It is told that our Lord on 
one occasion “took Peter and John and James, and 
went up into a mountain to pray. And as He 
prayed the fashion of His countenance was altered 
and His raiment was white and glistering. And 
behold, there talked with Him two men, which were 
Moses and Elias; who appeared in glory, and spake 
of His decease which He should accomplish at 
Jerusalem.” 2 

The Transfiguration—that unique event in His 
human history — exemplifies the change which shall 
pass upon the body at its Resurrection. It indicates 

1 Exposition of the Creed. Article xi, 

2 Luke ix. 23-31. 


348 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


that the glory of the Lord shall be shared by His 
saints ; for Moses and Elias appeared with Him “ in 
glory.” It indicates, too, the possibility of a spiritual 
communion far transcending the limits of time or 
place or condition; for the three disciples knew 
and recognised the saints of olden days; and so it 
sheds a light upon the life of Heaven. 

The Resurrection of the body is, as has been said, 
a Christian doctrine. It is believed, simply and 
solely, on the authority of the Lord and His 
Apostles. But it completes or consummates the 
theory of Redemption as sanctifying the whole 
triune nature of Man. It places the body in its true 
light, not as a mere prison-house of the spirit, not as 
a necessary centre and source of evil, but as a 
material form endued with a sovereign destiny, or, in 
St. Paul’s words, as “ a shrine of the Holy Spirit.” 

But all that need here be said is that in this true 
conception of the body of the Resurrection there is 
nothing that militates against the pure, immortal, 
spiritual, eternal life for which this essay has been 
a plea. For this is certain that, when the body 
revives at the Resurrection, it will not be a material 
body, but etherealised and glorified. The faith of 
Christ adds a glorified, immortal body, however it 


AMPLIFICATION OF THE BELIEF 


349 


may be most justly imagined, to a glorified, immortal 
soul. 

This is the full doctrine of Immortality as revealed 
in the Gospel. 

Immortality, as this essay has argued, is the in¬ 
alienable prerogative of Man. It is the prerogative 
not of his body but of his soul, and above all of his 
spirit. At death the human body is dissolved; but 
the soul survives in the plenitude of its intellectual, 
moral and spiritual powers. 

Jesus Christ revealed “ the Eternal Life,” which 
was His own Life, as the true or perfect life of the 
soul. And they in whom “ the Eternal Life ” is 
realised possess in themselves the secret of Immor¬ 
tality. To attain this Life is the hope and effort of 
Christians. To give it to others was the privilege 
of Christ. Human nature, in winning “ the Eternal 
Life” has reached the highest point of which it is 
or can ever be capable. It is the life that the 
angels live. In the cloudless contemplation of 
God's glory, in the luminous understanding of His 
Providence, in the devout adoration of His wisdom 
and His love, the human soul, being emancipated 
from the bonds of the material body, enjoys and 
exhibits its full affinity to the Godhead. 


35 ° 


THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY 


Beyond and above human apprehension lies “ the 
Eternal Life ” in its integrity. It is begun, it is not 
completed or perfected, on earth. No living soul 
may know its wonders or its joys. To it belong the 
things that eye has never seen, nor ear heard, nor 
heart conceived. It is the fruition of peace and 
purity and love. It is the satisfaction of the longings 
and desires by which human nature on earth is 
quickened and sanctified. 

All that is vital to Humanity depends upon the 
faith of the soul’s Immortality. To plead for that 
faith, to make it reasonable and acceptable, has been 
the object of this essay. For to Man it is all in all. 
Without it life is poor and sad and purposeless. It 
were better—I speak as I think — not to be born. 
But the soul which looks to the infinite spaces of 
Immortality may wait, in tranquil hope and faith, 
until God shall in His mercy make the mysteries of 
life to be clear. For where the Eternal Life springs 
up in the soul, there is the peace that passes 
understanding. 

May they who read this essay — and he too 
who has written it — not come short of “ the 
Eternal Life,” which is in Christ Jesus! 


THE GOSPEL FOR AN AGE OF DOUBT. 

By HENRY VAN DYKE. 

BEING THE 

YALE LECTURES ON PREACHING, 1896. 

i2mo. Price $1.75. 

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“ A most timely book. It meets the questions which are stirring in the minds of 
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of a young man troubled by doubts, with a reasonable assurance it would lead to a 
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CHRISTIANITY AND IDEALISM. 

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By JOHN WATSON, LL.D., 

Professor of Moral Philosophy in Queen’s University, Kingston, Can. 

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OUTLINES OF SOCIAL THEOLOGY. 

By WM. DeWITT HYDE, D.D., 

President of Bowdoin College, and Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy. 

i2mo. Cloth. Pp. 260. Price $1.50. 

Part I. Theological; II. Anthropological; III. Sociological. 

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is impossible to separate God from man or man from God. They are correlative 
terms.’ The author plants himself firmly on this social conception of theology and 
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relations.”— The Ind'ependetit. 

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a social movement, and that the emphasis hitherto of an individualistic aspect of 
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sequence a contribution distinctively to social theology. 

“ Readers of the author’s luminous articles in magazines will not be surprised to 
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prayer, the question of church unity, and the larger relations of theology to anthro¬ 
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Social Theology.’ It is not sociology viewed theistically; it is theology viewed 
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Man,’ contribute one notably new and crystallizing thought to a familiar discussion. 
It is rather, as its title indicates, an ‘outline.’ But it is not a skeleton. It is full 
of life, of blood, of nerves. In it the author reflects, in fresh and vital statements, 
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which lie in modern consciousness, either as undefined experiences or as individual 
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